


Admissions, Interrogatories, and Other Discoveries

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [12]
Category: Cable and Deadpool, Captain Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Legal Drama, Multi, motion practice universe, suffolk county legal aid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:40:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 150,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson.  Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.</p><p>And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Coupling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As previously stated in other disclaimers: the following story is a work of fiction. At the time of this writing, I am a law school graduate preparing to take the bar examination. My experiences include working as a legal intern in my jurisdiction, and the idea of writing this series came about because of the work I was doing every day in a law office not unlike the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
> 
> That said, any similarity in this story to real people, places, events, or cases is entirely accidental. Nothing in this story is based directly off my experience. At no time have I lifted real cases, scenarios, or people from my work life and deposited them into this fic, and I won’t be doing so. Ever.
> 
> Along those lines, too, please keep in mind: this is fiction. Although some of the law featured in this story is based on the real law of my jurisdiction, I have done no additional research and do not intend to. Legal concepts may be oversimplified, under-nuanced, or simply wrong for the purpose of the narrative. I also am not familiar with the inner workings of an office like the one portrayed in this story (a legal aid office), and some details may be incorrect or omitted.
> 
> This story involves characters which first appeared either in [Motion Practice](http://archiveofourown.org/works/489470) or [Wade Wilson Explains it All](http://archiveofourown.org/works/675723). Reading these stories for context is not required but may be helpful. The first chapter also contains spoilers for Permanency.
> 
> Thank you as always to Jen and saranoh, who have been incredibly encouraging as I embark on this new journey with new characters.

“I can’t believe Stark conned somebody into marrying him,” Carol says.

She’s perched on the edge of the conference room table, case file in her lap and eyes squinting at the television screen. She’d wandered down the hallway on her way to do whatever she does wherever she usually does it—after a year at legal aid, Wade’s still not sure that Carol really accomplishes anything besides yelling—then came right back to peer at the TV.

Wade wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “Shotgun wedding,” he explains once he’s swallowed the salsa-tastic ambrosia of the gods known as his breakfast burrito.

“Pretty sure shotgun weddings only happen when somebody’s pregnant,” she returns.

Wade shrugs. “Pretty sure their cute little black kid came from somewhere,” he retorts, and reaches for his burrito again.

In his defense, he really hadn’t planned on watching Tony Stark on morning TV. Who in their right (or slightly-right, or slightly-wrong, or wrong) mind’d drop into a chair, flick on the old boob tube, and think to themselves, “Hey, I wanna watch some billionaire lawyer guy talk about needy kids for ten minutes”? But he’d needed to eat somewhere, and his desk was pretty much just asking for him to dump salsa on a case file or whatever, and it wasn’t like anybody else was watching TV at nine-thirty on a Monday morning.

He’d flipped past _Star Trek: Voyager_ reruns and’d almost settled on them when he’d caught Stark on the local morning show. And when Clint’d responded to his red-alert text with _yeah his kid’s got us watching it_ —

Look, the point is, he had a pretty good reason for all this. Okay? Okay.

“I can’t believe he’s gesturing so much with his left hand,” Bobby offers, because it’s Bobby. He’s always around, hovering and poking his head into people’s offices like he’s either bored or really concerned about their well-being. Wade wishes it was the first one—hey, Bobby works with old people, it could easily be the first one—but he knows deep down it’s the second. Bobby is literally the nicest person he’s ever met. Like, if he were Catholic (he’s not; Wade’s asked), he’d be sainted or whatever.

He’s sitting next to Wade, watching the program eagerly, which means Wade gets to witness the way he scowls when Carol starts laughing. It’s a big belly laugh, and a chunk of scrambled egg falls out of Wade’s burrito and onto the foil. “You’re kidding, right?” she demands, twisting around to look at Bobby.

She braces herself on one hand, and the way she’s leaning back, it’s at least a little _Moulin Rouge_. Wade wishes he found her hotter, ‘cause the twist-and-stare move’s pretty good. 

“About what?” Bobby asks.

“About mocking Stark for showing off his new bling.”

Bobby frowns. He looks old when he does it, all crinkly and craggy. It’s a shame, too, ‘cause he’s kind of hot when he’s not scowling like an old guy chasing kids off his lawn. “What are you talking about?” he asks.

On the TV screen, Tony Stark runs his fingers through his hair. The fingers of his left hand, to be exact, and exactness is important in law and ring-flashing contests. Wade’s phone chimes while Carol and Bobby glare right through their bitch-off, and he almost chokes on a mouthful of egg and sausage when he reads the thing:

 **Clint:** _he should just get bruces name tattooed on his forehead at this point_

He swallows, still kind of laughing, and glances at the screen again. Now Stark’s gesturing, lots of loop-de-loops with his left hand, and his ring is sparkling in the TV studio’s lights again and again and—

It’s just sad, really.

“It’s just sad, really,” Carol complains with a shake of her head. Her hair’s pulled back and her ponytail looks almost spiky, like it might kill somebody. “Between you and Stark, you could blind someone with all your ring-finger peacock displays.”

“I don’t display my ring finger,” Bobby argues. Carol catches and holds his eyes, and for a couple seconds, it’s like an anime, with the spiky, sparkly lines of annoyance between them. Carol cocks an eyebrow, and Bobby old-man frowns again. “I don’t,” he says.

“Drake.” Carol’s voice is even and steady. Wade’s pretty sure it’s her lawyer-voice, the one she uses in the courtroom—if she ever practices in a courtroom. Does she practice in a courtroom? Has she ever stood in front of a judge before? He really needs to figure out what she’s paid for. “You are _worse_ than Stark. I mean, if he’s at nine, you’re at eleven. It’s constant, and you’ve been married since you were twelve.”

Bobby rolls his eyes. It’s a sure sign he’s actually kind of annoyed, but then again, Wade knew that already. Because one, Bobby only rolls his eyes when he’s starting to get all riled up (hard to do, but Carol’s pretty good at it), and because two, Bobby hates when people mock his marriage. Not that Carol’s mocking it, exactly, but— Well, okay, you know how in a video game, a lot of bosses have soft underbellies or something you’ve gotta hit first before you can kill them?

That’s what Bobby’s marriage is: his soft underbelly that shatters his armor so then you can really pick him apart with your scimitar. Or whatever.

“Okay, first,” Bobby says, counting off on his fingers because he only ever gestures when he’s flustered—no, seriously, Wade’s sure it’s a tic, he’s practically charted it in his office ‘cause he likes knowing information about the people he’s stuck with forty-ish hours a week, “we got married when I was twenty, not twelve.”

“Same thing,” Wade mutters, and Carol grins like a Cheshire cat.

Something angry flashes across Bobby’s face. Wade wonders whether he’s thinking about murdering them. He sometimes suspects that Bobby’s one of those guys who’ll pop up as a suspect in a _Dateline Mystery_ episode eventually, the sweet husband who nobody expected to strangle his wife in the bathtub.

Except not with the wife-murder, because he’s wifeless and because his husband’s built like Nate. Not that Wade’s considered a side-by-side comparison, or anything.

“And second,” Bobby’s pressing, which forces Wade to pay attention again, “I don’t gesture with my ring hand. I barely remember I _have_ a ring hand, it’s not—”

“You’re doing it right now,” Carol says pleasantly.

Bobby stares at his left hand. It’s frozen in the middle of them, floating there, halfway through a frustrated little flap. He eyes it like it’s a phantom limb or something before he amends, “I’m left-handed! It’s my dominant hand!”

Carol laughs then, bright and sunny, and Wade reaches to help himself to another bite of burrito. When he looks up, though, Nate’s in the doorway, his shoulder against the jamb and his arms crossed over his chest.

It’s a very broad chest, and those are very broad arms.

For a second, Wade forgets about the burrito altogether. Not because he necessarily wants to eye Nate up and down like he’s the Old Spice “the tickets are now diamonds” guy or anything, but because he’s hard to miss.

That old-fashioned phrase about darkening doorways exists for people like Nate Summers.

“You know what?” Bobby asks. Carol rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but she’s still grinning. She looks light and fluffy, which is funny because her soul’s as dark as the doorway when Nate steps into it. “You can mock it all you like, but there’s nothing wrong with being happily married.”

Carol snorts. “Except everything,” she mutters.

“Except nothing,” Bobby challenges. He leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his own chest, but it’s not nearly as impressive as with Nate. Wade wonders if anybody else’s even noticed Nate standing there, or if his coworkers are too focused on arguing with each other to pay attention. Either way, Bobby’s shirt gaps from the way he crosses his arms. “Marriage is a commitment. It shows that your relationship matters. And you know, maybe Stark was a, well—”

“Man-slut?” Wade offers around a mouthful of burrito.

“A womanizing dickhead?” Carol chimes in.

Bobby forces a tiny, tight smile. The tips of his ears are red, like he’s embarrassed. Which doesn’t really make sense, given that Bobby clearly has a lot of sex with his husband. Like, a _lot_ of sex. Wade’d stayed one hotel room over that time they all went up to hear Emma argue an appeal, and if that one night was any indication, well, it’s a _freaking lot_ of sex. So why Bobby blushes about slutty Tony Stark man-sex, Wade’ll never understand. “If he’s not either of those things anymore,” he says after a pause, “and he’s willing to marry someone, then—”

“Your premise is flawed.” 

Nate says it like he’s talking about the weather, all casual and easy, and both Carol and Bobby jerk their heads over to stare at him. They look surprised, but hey, Wade gets that. His first three weeks at the office, he’d pretty much jumped out of his pants every time Nate showed up in his doorway, because Nate just _showed up_. He’s quiet for a guy that big, almost cautious with the way he moves, and it’s kind of disconcerting until you get used to it.

How nobody else’s gotten used to it, yet, Wade doesn’t know.

But as nonchalant as Nate’s actual words are, there’s something flinty in his eyes, all steady and serious. His attention sweeps between the two of them and Wade thinks for a couple seconds that he’s said everything he wants to offer—at least, until he catches Bobby’s gaze in his creepy, non-blinking way. They stare each other down until Bobby jerks his head toward the TV.

Stark scratches his chin with his middle and ring fingers.

He’s so weird.

“Marriage,” Nate continues like he never paused in the first place, “doesn’t change your nature. It doesn’t transform you into a wholly new human being. And it certainly can’t undo a lifetime of philandering—”

“Good word,” Wade puts in, and Carol snorts at him.

“—or suddenly guarantee long-term devotion.”

“Commitment isn’t useless, either,” Bobby challenges. His face creases back into old-man mode. Or maybe, this time, into whatever mode you want to call it when a baby’s straining to fill his diaper. Bobby leans his arms on the table. “Maybe marriage doesn’t _promise_ any of those things, but it at least implies meaning. It implies that you’re in it for the long haul, that—”

“Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce,” Nate cites. He doesn’t roll his eyes—he barely _ever_ rolls his eyes, he prefers creepy, never-blinking stare-downs, in case you missed that memo—but it’s sort of in the subtext.

“He says to the family lawyer,” Carol mutters.

“We need, as a society, to stop assuming that the only route to long-term happiness is through coupling.” Nate raises a hand and waves it idly, like he’s trying to clear the air of a nasty smell. “We live in the twenty-first century. Marriage rates are down, single people are waiting much longer to even consider permanent partnerships, more and more educated individuals are choosing the unmarried, childless lifestyle, and—”

“Yeah, but don’t you ever want to be with someone?”

Wade isn’t really sure he’s the one talking until he hears his own voice, and even then, it takes Carol and Bobby staring him down for him to realize what exactly he’s said. For a split, blink-or-miss-it second, Nate looks kind of surprised that Wade’s blurted out anything at all, but then the surprise disappears.

Of course it does. Wade’s sure sometimes that Nate’s half robot, a giant muscled-out tin man. If he only had a heart, and all that.

He waits for the android face to soften, but yeah, like that’ll ever happen.

“I mean, come on,” he presses, because now that he’s talking, he might as well commit. “You don’t ever sit up in your fortress of solitude and think, ‘I want to cuddle. And kiss. And tonight, in bed, have somebody’s mouth on my—’”

“Okay, _no_ ,” Bobby cuts in. He sticks up his hands and waves them around. “Please don’t. You will ruin sex for me.”

Wade thinks about pointing out that Bobby’s ruined sex for just about everybody else in the world, but in the end, he keeps watching Nate. And Nate, because he’s a creepy man-android with no heart, watches right back.

“No,” he finally answers after what feels like forever. “I don’t think about any of that.”

He steps away from the doorway and disappears down the hall, leaving Carol to release a long, low whistle and mutter something about enormous dicks. Wade thinks for a second she’s being literal instead of figurative, but then Bobby agrees and sort of rules out the possibility that anybody’s thinking about Nate’s naughty bits. Wade listens to the last thirty seconds of Stark’s interview without really hearing it, white noise more than anything, and then gathers up his burrito and his phone. Carol and Bobby are back to arguing, not that he’s paying attention. No, what he’s paying attention to is climbing the stairs up to his office, closing the door, and finishing his breakfast in peace.

One of the two waiting text messages from Clint is whining about how Wade’s guess of forty ring-flashes was right on the money. Wade tries to grin about it, but the second of the two is Clint cancelling muy thai to go out to dinner with Phil.

Great.

Wade texts him _kk_ and then tosses his phone onto the corner of his desk. He sits there for a second, staring at his messy files and his piles of post-its, all the hallmarks of a job he actually really likes with people he actually really likes. 

Except when you stare at something too long, it all turns blurry and wavy around the edges, and that’s dumb. It’s dumb like Bobby’s sunny-side-up picture of the universe, and dumb like Nate’s refusal to admit that maybe not all relationships suck.

It’s all dumb, he decides, and reaches for his burrito.

Turns out, his burrito is cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brief explanation of the title: 
> 
> The process of obtaining information from an adversary in a lawsuit is called discovery. Admissions and interrogatories are two commonly-used forms of discovery in civil litigation. An admission is when the adversary either admits or denies an allegation. An interrogatory is a question that the adversary answers. If you think these things make no sense in terms of the story, trust me: you’ll be surprised.
> 
> A posting schedule through early August can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/50394294154/the-latest-mpu-schedule-cant-stop-wont-stop), but is subject to adjustment as the bar exam approaches.


	2. Commandments Regarding Pretty Girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade is a man of action! However, not everyone takes that news particularly well. Wade kind of hates them for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Learned Hand is the name of a well-known judge from the federal appellate courts.
> 
> As sort of a general proposition, this story will feature random criminal defense clients throughout. These are original characters created for the purpose of Wade’s story, and are not intended to resemble any actual human being, living or dead. 
> 
> Thanks as always to the two greatest ladies around, Jen and saranoh, who are about to start suffering what we call “author studies for the bar and stops churning out new chapters.” Cherish your biweekly schedule, readers, for they are soon to be tormented with wordless silence.

“It’s not probative,” Wade tells Clint, and Clint rolls his eyes.

They’re sitting in Clint’s ridiculous office, the one with the mismatched chairs from Goodwill that smell like mothballs and the huge pile of pillows on the window ledge, and Clint mostly looks tired. Wade knows he starts a jury trial against Sif on Monday, which is pretty much a recipe for disaster. Oh, Sif is incredibly pretty and crazy smart, but she’s also really mean.

Seriously. 

She’s snaked Wade’s favorite parking spot at the judicial complex at least a dozen times, now. If that’s not proof, he doesn’t know what is.

But tired as Clint clearly is—and it’s crystal clear, because he looks simultaneously twenty-five and fifty right now—he’s also a pretty good host. He’s provided Wade with hot coffee in a Suffolk County District Attorney mug, a bowl of doughnut holes stolen out of the box in the break room, and one of his awesome smooth-writing ballpoint pens. 

He’s mostly twirling the pen, not using it, but the point stands.

“I mean, okay, I get it,” he amends, because Clint’s default face when he’s tired looks a lot like his default face when he’s annoyed, and Wade’d rather not end up on _that_ side of the guy, “my client’s kind of a sex fiend or whatever—”

“I don’t think this has anything to do with sex,” Clint cuts in, sucking powdered sugar off his thumb.

“—but you know what happens if we leave it on the video.” Wade leans forward, snags a jelly-filled hole—okay, no, _never_ using that particular string of words together in that particular order again—and then sort of points at Clint. Except he squeezes the doughnut, too, forcing a little bead of jelly through the seam. “I’ll object. Because, really, read the rules of evidence, it’s more prejudicial than probative—”

“It shows your client attempting to bribe a trooper with a roadside BJ,” Clint reminds him. Like he’d forget about that one.

“—and needs to be excluded. And _then_ ,” he presses, licking the tiny smear of jelly away, “if Judge English rules in your favor and lets it in, I’ve gotta appeal. And appealing means that Stark’s in your office bugging you about it every day for a _month_ while—”

“Wait,” Clint interrupts. He even holds up a hand. Wade grins and pops the whole doughnut hole into his mouth. The first bite is this perfect balance of flaky pastry and sweet, tangy jelly, and— God, it’s like the greatest invention of mankind, exploding across his taste buds. Well, the greatest invention second to Mexican food. And internet porn.

He grabs another hole out of the bowl, but Clint’s still frowning at him. “Your argument,” he says, like he’s just now caught up with the rest of the conversation, “is that I should cut the attempted bribe—”

“Attempted sexytimes,” Wade corrects.

“—from the video because it’ll prevent me from dealing with Tony’s crazy during a theoretical appeal based on your theoretical objection?”

Wade nods, still chewing, and for a second, he thinks that Clint’s gonna argue. No, not just argue; he thinks Clint’s gonna laugh and throw a special kind of fit, because that’s the sort of face Clint’s pulling. Constipated, a little, but also fed up.

Wade wonders how awful Sif’s been, and whether she’s at least worn sexy heels to make up for the intentional infliction of emotional distress that she inflicts on pretty much every person ever.

Before either of them can say anything, though, Pepper Potts pauses outside of Clint’s office door. She’s wearing a pencil skirt and a drapey, clingy top, and there’s nothing in the world that compares to a sexy ginger in a sexy top. Except for the part where the sexy ginger is scowling, her fingers clenched so hard around her cell phone that Wade thinks for a second she might snap it in two.

“I am not going to Office Max to buy you _gel pens_ , Tony!” she sneers into the aforementioned phone. It’s barely controlled, like she might turn around and burn the whole building down. “No. No, you have a car, you can— You were watching cat videos on YouTube, you cannot be that busy!” 

She stalks back down the hallway after that, frantically gesturing at whatever rant Tony’s subjecting her to on the other end of the line, and Wade swears he can hear her sigh echoing all the way down the hall. When he twists back over to face Clint’s desk, the other guy’s holding onto a powdered sugar doughnut hole in one hand and his coffee mug in the other.

The doughnut hole’s a little squished.

“Fine,” he agrees, and if he minds Wade’s fist-pump of victory, he at least keeps his mouth shut about it. At least, he keeps his mouth shut about it _for now_ , because Clint at muy thai’s sort of like a pissy ex-girlfriend when you come to reclaim your hoodie: he bitches the whole time about everything anybody’s ever done to slight him.

But he’s quick, muscular, and endowed with a killer ass that Wade tries very hard not to look at, so Wade never mentions the pissy ex-girlfriend thing.

He’s leaning over the desk to snag a victory doughnut when the phone rings. It’s that annoying standard office ring, nothing special, but Clint glares at it like it just spun its head around and started speaking Latin. “Sif,” he grumbles.

Wade cringes. “You want me to stay? Be a witness so I can tell the jury of your peers that you were totally justified in murdering her?” He’s pretty sure Clint’s head-tilt translates directly to _I will punch you without further consideration on the matter_. “You know what? I think I’ll go, instead.” 

Clint nods before he picks up the phone, his voice all tense and lawyery. Wade grabs his coffee, salutes with it, and ducks away from Clint’s pissy-face before something ends up hurled in his general direction.

Everything in the district attorney’s office is always crowded and busy, like life turned up to eleven, and the hallway’s no exception. Wade’s not sure how anyone accomplishes anything with all the distractions: the voices, the ringing phones, the whirring copiers, the sound of Tony shouting for Pepper. He dodges out of the way of a file clerk steering an overstuffed cart, half-twirls between Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner as they engage in a _West Wing_ -style walk-and-talk, and ends up standing right next to Darcy’s cubicle. Darcy’s sorting out jury questionnaires to prep for Monday’s main event, her head bobbing to some inaudible tune piped in through her headphones. She’s a car dancer, Wade knows—he witnessed it at a stoplight once, but she just flipped him off for laughing at her—but really, her chair-shimmy’s even better. 

He knows he should finish his coffee and duck out of the office before Coulson’s on him like a bloodhound with a scent—he’s an enemy, after all, a well-disguised super-spy crossing the demilitarized zone of the hallway to slip into headquarters—but he ends up standing there, watching Darcy. He studies the bounce of her hair, the jangly tinkle of her necklace, the subtle shift of her shoulders, and he tries to figure out why he’s never really noticed how _pretty_ she is before right this second. Which is dumb, because of course he’s noticed. He’s commented on almost all of her Facebook selfies, after all, and he’s on the trivia team started by her and all her law school buddies (the Learned Hand Jobs, well on their way to being the most mediocre of Suffolk County bar trivia teams). It’s just that, even after all that time, he’s never really _noticed_ -noticed. 

Like, he’s never caught that her lips are super-pouty and perpetually smeared with shiny gloss.

Or that she fills out her v-neck sweater in a way that’s probably banned in Utah.

Or that she wears her skirt short, wears her boots tall, and wields bright red fingernails that are porno-lesbian long.

It’s almost like, all of a sudden, she’s not Darcy anymore, but— 

Okay. Here’s the best example Wade’s got right now:

You know those “magic eye” posters that hang in every dentist’s office in America? At first glance, they’re just these weird, squiggly lines with no real pattern or shape, and you sit there, waiting for your root canal and thinking how lame they are. But the longer you sit and stare, the more your eyes start to cross, and all of a sudden the squiggly lines blur together to reveal a dolphin jumping through the waves. You blink too much before you see the dolphin, though, you lose out.

But once you _see_ that damn dolphin, man, there’s no unseeing it.

That’s Darcy Lewis, a squiggly line turned—

Something smacks Wade in the forehead just then, and he blinks down long enough to watch a pen cap tumble along his shirt and onto the floor. On Darcy’s desk, the lego trebuchet she engineered and built with the help of Stark and Stark’s kid is still bouncing slightly, and she’s got her arms crossed over her chest.

Well, not _over_.

Her arms are more a shelf for the full force of her—sweater kittens.

He really could’ve done without seeing the dolphin.

“Are you broken?” she asks in her usual, flippant tone, the one that reminds him of Donna Noble but without the accent. Her head swivels with it, and he briefly imagines her snapping in a z-formation. “Or is this a creeper thing? Like that time I asked you to pick me up for trivia and you already knew my address?”

Wade knows what he should do in this situation, because he’s done it the last six times they’ve fallen into this argument. It’s the one where he rolls his eyes and reminds her that her address’s public on Facebook, and where she then sneers at him that nobody pays _that_ much attention to the personal information that’s posted there, and where _he_ then reminds _her_ that she snagged his cell number that way, and it all kind of devolves into half-drunk yelling. But that’s when they’re at trivia, full of beer and camaraderie and his elbow on the back of her chair.

Oh god. He almost always puts his elbow on the back of her chair. Not in a strictly-friendly way, either.

The thought careens into his brain like an out-of-control freight train, and suddenly, the only words he can think of—the only words that emanate from his stupid, clumsy, broken mouth—are these:

“You and me and food?”

They trip and stumble like he’s never strung together a sentence before, and he feels his face flare neon red. Darcy blinks once and then scowls at him over the top of her glasses. Back on her birthday, when her friends’d wrapped her Corolla in plastic cling-wrap and then’d spray-painted flowers and penises on top of it, she’d presented them all with that same scowl before she burst out laughing.

It’s her _I can’t decide whether I like this prank_ scowl.

Wade rubs a hand over his face. “I mean,” he corrects, because he actually speaks the language, “we should eat food together.”

“We eat food together at trivia every Friday night.”

“Yeah, but. I.” When did English turn so confusing and elusive? Because it’s one thing to know that English’s hard for non-native speakers, but right now, Wade feels like every word he knows has been drenched in vegetable oil and keeps sliding out of reach. His hand snakes to the side of his neck, and it feels hot and flushed.

Maybe he’s having a stroke. Is this what having a stroke feels like? Can somebody please send the big guy upstairs an e-mail noting that Wade Winston Wilson is too young and not-ugly to die?

He clears his throat and tries again. “I, you know, we’re friends and everything,” he attempts, but he feels like his mouth’s full of sandpaper. “And, I mean, I usually do other friend things, like, every night of the week—” Lie. “—or work from home on big important cases—” Also lie. “—but this week’s been pretty slow.”

L— Oh, wait, no, that’s true.

“So I thought maybe you’d want to, you know, eat dinner sometime.”

Something in Darcy’s scowl softens right then, downgrading it into a puzzled little frown. She keeps staring at him, though, her whole face caught up in this weird cautiousness like she maybe suspects he’s grown a couple extra limbs. He considers patting himself down, but a quick visual inspection and some toe-wiggling confirms that everything’s in the right place.

Unless he’s regrown his missing ball, but Darcy’d need x-ray vision or really nimble fingers to evaluate that one.

The warm feeling in his throat and cheeks never really recedes, though. At least, not until Darcy finally shrugs and says, “Sure.”

It’s as nonchalant and casual as that little blond shit from _Game of Thrones_ announcing that he’s had the hot ginger kid’s dad beheaded. In fact, it’s _so_ nonchalant and casual that Wade sort of blinks at it. He wonders what kind of face he’s pulling, whether it’s a Clint Barton mean-mug or a Bobby Drake constipated crinkle. 

Either way, he blurts, “What?”

“You want to eat dinner? Let’s eat dinner.” Darcy flops back in her chair and graciously removes the arm-shelf, causing a bit of jiggling that Wade can’t help but appreciate. With the argyle sweater, the glasses, and the boots, she’s totally pulling off the full sexy librarian. “It’ll be nice to get away from the law school crazies and the preggo.” She catches his eyes, and he feels the red in his face redouble its efforts. “Tomorrow night? We could try that new Thai place, I’ve—”

“Yeah, definitely.” Wade spits out the two words like they’re strapped to a rocket and zipping up through the atmosphere. She quirks a shapely eyebrow, the frown almost crawling back across her pouty, pouty lips, and he forces an awkward smile. “I, uh, I’m crazy into peanut sauce,” he says, which is another lie. Isn’t there a commandment about that or something? _Thou shalt not lie to pretty girls with incredible lips_? He really needs to look into that. “You wanna meet there? At, like, six or something?”

“Sure,” Darcy replies after about one half-second’s hesitation. The pause twists something in Wade’s stomach, but then again, he’s used to the twisty-stomach feeling lately. He’s spent the last three days beating it down, ever since Nate decided to fill the conference room with his pessimism and forever-alone attitude. Not that it was _hard_ —he’d had muy thai (without Clint), a couple runs (alone), and a _Golden Girls_ marathon to keep him occupied (hey, that’s his private time, okay?)—but the feeling’d sort of stuck around.

Maybe he has appendicitis. Or an ulcer. He should call Bobby’s husband and ask for a quickie exam.

He realizes his mind’s wandering and tries to jerk it back into reality, but all he discovers is that the world’s as it should be: Darcy’s staring up at him, the district attorney’s office is buzzing around him, and his face still feels too warm. He thinks for a second Darcy’s about to say something—her lips sure twitch like she’s thinking about it—but then, her phone rings.

Her phone rings, Bucky shouts something about an e-mail, Thor’s laughter trickles out into the hall, and—

Well, the point is, Darcy jumps back into her work without another word, her hair bouncing and the red nails on one hand clicking on the keyboard as she answers her phone with the other.

The point is, Wade reminds himself, he has a date with her tomorrow night.

 

==

 

“Okay, so,” Wade says, flattening the file open on the conference room table. Or at least, _trying_ to flatten the file open on the table. The one cover keeps jumping back up, antsy to close.

He hates that folder. Just on principle, he absolutely and immediately hates its very existence.

Across from him, Casey wriggles. She’s a nice girl—well, woman, technically, because Wade’s pretty sure she’s at least three years older than him, she’s all skinny and slight and _looks_ like she’s twelve—but she’s always in motion. Shifting, fidgeting, playing with a pen or her fingernails or her bracelets, or scratching itches that Wade’s pretty sure aren’t actually there. The first time Casey left the office, Emma’d glared after her until she climbed in her Buick and drove off.

“No meth-heads,” she’d declared.

“Pretty sure that’s nine-tenths of my client base,” Wade’d pointed out. Emma’s head’d snapped around so hard he’d figured she’d need one of those whiplash braces after. She’d glared at him a little like her life depended on it, so he’d held up his hands. “Not meth,” he’d promised. “I asked.”

She’d rolled her eyes. “Because criminals are known for honesty,” she’d sneered. Snidely, too, because her only tones of voice were then and ever will be “snide” and “pissy.” She’d whirled on the heel of her ridiculous boots and started clomping down the hallway. Wade’d almost tripped trying to keep up, never mind while keeping up and blurting, “Because she doesn’t smell.” 

Emma’d stopped, twirled around, and he’d raised his hands again. He’d worried then—still worries, actually—that she might eventually haul off and punch him. 

“Meth addicts smell,” he’d pressed when she kept staring at him, skeptical but not totally unconvinced. “Like, they smell like meat that’s rotting slowly from the inside out, and the teeth—”

“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Emma’d interrupted. Wade’d kind of grinned in victory.

“Besides,” he’d added, flipping Casey’s file open and tilting it her way, “if you look at her charges . . . ”

And as fish-faced and big-eyed as Emma went, looking at the last two years of Casey’s life, she let the whole meth-addict thing go.

But in Emma’s defense, Casey wiggles around like a toddler on meth even now, while Wade folds his hands on top of her stupid file to keep it from flipping shut. “The good news,” he says, and her fingers still as she glances over at him, “is that Wal-Mart’s agreed to let the theft charges go. They weren’t super into filing them in the first place, I guess the camera coverage in the yard-and-pool section’s pretty lousy, so they’ll let it slide.”

Casey beams like she’s won the lottery. She’s pretty, in a way. Not like Darcy, who looks simultaneously like she stepped out of an episode of _Doctor Who_ and off the pages of a pretty raunchy magazine (again, lest you forget: v-neck sweater), but in a sort of worldly way. Because her eyes light up when she smiles, her hair’s a little messy but in that way that could pass as hipster-chic, and she wears boots with her sweatpants in an unironic way. 

“That’s good, right?” she asks, her fingertips staring to drum a little pattern on the table. “I mean, that’s a win, and no more stupid pleas, we can—”

“Well, yeah,” Wade breaks in, and his tie starts to feel a little tight. “But, uh, there’s bad news to go with the good news.”

Casey’s smile falls.

“The sort of other side of the coin for not pursuing the theft charges is that you have to agree to stay off the premises. For, you know, ever.”

Casey’s out of her chair immediately, swearing and pacing and throwing up her hands like somebody’s just force-fed her an entire container of those little chocolate-covered coffee beans, and Wade sighs. Not so much because of her reaction, but because she’s had the same reaction the last five times they’ve ended up in this same conversation. Five times. In a year. Because—

“Every Wal-Mart in the county, plus Target _and_ the Kroger?” she demands, turning on Wade.

Wade forces a little smile. “And that Union County quick-mart place, since I represented you on—”

“Where am I supposed to buy groceries, huh?” She scratches her fingers through her hair, only adding to the hipstery raggedy-ness of it. “What if I run out of toilet paper? Of shampoo?”

“You can always send your husband.”

She snorts. “Emmett? And have him come home with ten pounds of beef jerky and nothing I need? Yeah, that’s great.”

“Uh, didn’t _you_ steal beef jerky from that other Wal—”

The force of Casey dropping into the wheeled chair interrupts the question, but Wade’s not sure he minds. Because when he looks over at her, her head’s dipped toward the floor and her fingers are threaded through her hair, gripping hard. He catches the shake of her shoulders and suddenly feels, well, bad. 

He’s defended a lot of assholes—drunks, burglars, a guy who tried to violate his girlfriend’s sister but the girl dick-punched him first, batterers, gun nuts, you name it—but Casey’s not really like that. Oh, she’s stolen various items from various convenience, grocery, and super-stores all over the county, but it’s a compulsion, you know? It’s not a crime, it’s a sickness.

She rocks a little in the chair, and Wade feels his own shoulders slump a little as he leans forward.

“Look,” he says, gently as he knows how, “we talked about this after the Kroger thing, right? Kroger and Target both said that if you go ahead and do some therapy, they’ll lift the bans.”

“The fuck do I need therapy for?” Casey’s head jerks up. Her eyes are damp, and the tops of her cheeks, too. Before Wade can reach for the Kleenex box in the middle of the table, though, she wipes all the wet away with the cuff of her sweatshirt. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Wade sucks in and holds a breath for a couple seconds before he says, “You stole three bags of pool chemicals from Wal-Mart, and you don’t have a pool.” He watches her swipe at her face with her sleeve again, and abandons the stupid file that won’t stay open to sort of slide his chair in her direction. They end up almost bumping knees, which is probably unprofessional.

Then again, a lot of his practice walks the line of “probably unprofessional.” He should really work on that one. Just, you know, not today. 

“I called the therapy people yesterday,” he continues, and Casey rests her chin on a sweatshirt-covered hand. “They said that they’ll let you start up at the rate we talked about when you swiped those batteries from Kroger. Which still isn’t cheap, but I mean, it’s less than if they weren’t being cool about this.” Her eyes dip to the floor, and he nudges her knee with his. Really carefully, though, not in a way that could be turned into something dirty. Because yeah, Casey’s pretty, but she’s also tiny and fidgety and his client. “If it works, then it works, and you don’t have to worry about Emmett buying his weight in beef jerky. And if it doesn’t work, well, maybe he’ll spice it up and throw in some Easy Mac or something.”

She snorts again, right then, but it’s a laughing snort, the kind he can almost deal with because it means he’s done an okay job. Don’t tell anybody, but he likes when clients cry. Not because he’s a huge asshole or anything, but because it means they feel something. It means they’re _sorry_ , that they want to fix it, and—

Well, he’s seen the ones who aren’t sorry.

It’s not pretty.

“If I was rich,” Casey says after a couple seconds (and after she wipes her nose on her sleeve, too), “I’d still hire you as my lawyer.”

Wade grins. “If you were rich,” he returns, “I’d encourage you to buy up a Wal-Mart and steal all the pool chemicals and batteries you want from it.”

He should probably feel bad, or at least _weird_ , that when Nate walks by the door a couple minutes later, he and Casey are both laughing together, all loud and not entirely the way a lawyer and his client should act.

And he should probably feel _less_ weird about the fact that, when Nate catches them laughing, he smiles kind of like a human being before he walks away.

 

==

 

“I swear, med school is going to kill _me_ ,” Bobby complains that afternoon at almost-five.

It’s pitch black outside Wade’s office window, a sure sign he should just abandon ship and head home, but instead, he’s poring through discovery from the district attorney’s office. Well, okay, it’s not really _discovery_ as much as it’s an envelope filled with a bunch of police reports with little or no value in his life, but hey, they can call it whatever they want. 

On the plus side, he’s already quintuple-confirmed with Steve Rogers that nobody planned on charging Casey with any thefts for the pool chemical incident.

On the definitely-anything-but-plus side, Bobby’s moaning.

He’s all flopped-out on one of the chairs in Wade’s office, limbs sprawled and noodle-loose in their lazy splay. He’s wearing khakis and a button-down like an eighth-grader at the school sock hop. Wade thinks he maybe went to court like that, with a tie and a blazer on top of the whole ensemble, but confirming that means he’s paying close attention to Bobby and Bobby’s khakis.

He tries not to.

What? He likes them tight like Clint likes his slacks tight, and it’s distracting.

Bobby lulls his head against the back of the chair, sighing like a tire that’s losing air quick, and Wade abandons the police reports to stare him down. “Is this self-pity or marriage-pity?” he asks, then pauses. “Is there marriage-pity? Some other kind of pity? My-hubby’s-gonna-be-a-hot-doc pity?”

Bobby lifts his head long enough to roll his eyes. In fact, Wade’s about eighty-two percent sure that Bobby _only_ lifted his head to show off the roll of his pretty eyes with the long lashes and—

Focus, Wilson.

“You do get the part where he’s never home anymore, right?” Bobby asks.

Wade shrugs and flips past another fairly worthless police report. Seriously, folks, if you’re just going to write two sentences in cop-code, what’s the point of the report? “He could’ve stopped after he became a nurse,” he points out as he skims the next one. “Make you lose out on all that doctor-lawyer street cred.”

“I— Wait, what?”

“Hank.” Wade shrugs as he grabs a highlighter. He can feel Bobby’s frown radiating across the office. His old-man frowns must bring their own heat signature or something. “He could’ve quit school after he became a nurse.”

The sound Bobby releases is like the bastard love child of a sigh and a snort. “You don’t start out as a nurse and become a doctor, Wade. You—”

“ _Hellooooo_ nurse.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course, then you couldn’t play doctor, could you? I mean, maybe, but the exams wouldn’t be _quite_ as—”

“The answer, Bobby, is no.”

If Bobby’s frowns carry their own heat signature, then Nate’s voice is created from molten lava or something, because as soon as Wade hears it, he drags his highlighter right off the page and across his desk calendar. Said man of mystery and red-hot interjections is looming in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest and this tiny almost-amused almost-smile tripping across his lips. Actually, now that Wade spends a half-second thinking about it, his voice is almost-amused, too. 

It’s like the world’s weirdest algebra problem, in a way: almost-amused plus almost-smiling equals an almost-human Nate. Or like that character from the Disney movie, the son of Zeus who turned human thanks to drinking some weird poison, because he’s broad and hot and—

Uh. 

Anyway.

“If ‘no’ is the answer, what’s the question?” Wade asks before his train of thought falls right off the tracks. Bobby shoots Wade this momentarily weird look and then drops his head back against the chair. He should be glad neither Wade nor Nate are vampires, because there’s a lot of white neck on display. “Unless we’re playing _Jeopardy_. Are we—”

“Bobby asked whether you were listening,” Nate interrupts. He steps into the room like a jungle cat, as powerful as he is graceful. With the shock of silvery-white hair and all the muscle, he mostly resembles a snow leopard. “And had you not interrupted—”

“Like you really expected that to happen,” Wade cuts in, and he catches Bobby grinning.

“—I would have pointed out that you are in fact biologically predisposed to _not_ listen.”

Wade lets out a little noise he hopes sounds all scoffing and challenging-like. “Yeah, like you know anything about my biology.”

“Oh, I know enough,” Nate responds, and drops into the other chair.

Wade knows there are dozens of police reports weighing down his desk, waiting for his attention, and he also knows that his highlighter is leaking through at least January and February on his desk calendar, but neither stops him from catching Nate’s eyes. Nate meets them and stares right back, as even and steady as an Olympian on a balance beam, and he refuses to blink away. In the next chair over, Bobby groans something that sounds a whole lot like, “Not this again,” but Wade keeps staring.

Even when his fingers turn twitchy.

Even when the back of his neck starts to itch.

Even when— “Nathan Rumpelstiltskin Summers?” he guesses, and Nate’s mouth curls into the world’s slowest-burn grin.

He swears under his breath and reaches for the official score sheet while Bobby huffs out a pissy little breath. “How,” he demands, complete with a hand-toss and everything, “can you still not know his middle name?”

Wade shrugs as he adds tally number 238. “He’s an international man of mystery.”

“And,” Nate adds, “he guesses things like ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’”

“And Jesus,” Wade tosses in. Nate’s grin twitches a little wider, threatening to flash some pearly whites. “Last week’s guess was Jesus.”

“And Nathaniel,” Nate reminds him.

“Hey, how was I supposed to know that Nathaniel and Nathan were actually the same—”

“How is this my life?” Bobby interrupts. He jerks forward until he’s finally sitting up straight, the cheap plastic chair kind of rocking. Nate’s eyes twinkle like Santa in that Christmas poem. 

Wade will never in his natural life admit this aloud, okay, but he really likes _these_ moments with his coworkers, the ones where they all spend some time being humans instead of lawyers. 

Well, you know, when the moments aren’t being interrupted by Bobby’s belly-aching. Because right now, Bobby whines, “My husband’s working every night this week—”

“Then you’ll be insufferable by Monday,” Nate comments, and Wade grins.

“—I’m spending all _next_ week in probate court arguing over wills with greedy strangers, and you two are—” He waves a hand. “You’re _you_.”

“Technically,” Wade offers while Bobby’s fingers are still flapping, “I’m me and he’s him, and neither of us are—”

He’s cut off by a long, loud, frustrated Bobby Drake groan, the kind of groan that’s so far from sexual that it sounds more like someone’s stabbed the guy with a broadsword, and that’s when Wade bursts out laughing. He tries not to, really, but Bobby’s ridiculousness and Nate’s quiet almost-amusement are intoxicating, and it all sort of comes together in an unstoppable guffaw.

Luckily, as soon as he starts laughing, Bobby joins in. Wade even thinks he hears a couple seconds of Nate’s deep, throaty belly-laugh—this rare and elusive sound that’s more dangerous than any of your addictive street drugs—mixed in with the rest of it.

“We need to get out more,” Bobby declares once he’s finished. He shakes his head, sure, but he’s red-cheeked and back to his old, not-grumpy self. He drags a hand over his face for a half-second and then looks over at Nate. “You guys want to do something tomorrow night? Catch a movie, grab dinner, go bowling?”

“Bowling?” Nate echoes curiously.

“People still _bowl_?” Wade asks.

Bobby rolls his eyes at them. “Okay, so, not bowling,” he corrects, and Nate flashes Wade a split-second smile. It’s a funny smile, almost like this easy tease that sparks out of nowhere, and Wade feels it pinch somewhere in the depths of his gut. Like appendicitis or something, a sharp jab out of nowhere, but not in a painful way. No, it’s almost a good pinch, fizzy and warm. He’s not sure he _minds_ it, actually.

“Hey, Earth to Space Cadet Number One, come in,” Bobby says suddenly, and Wade blinks away from whatever weird place his mind went to see Bobby staring at him. Actually, Nate’s watching him too, but in a softer, less concerned sort of way.

Wade scratches the back of his neck. “Brain fart,” he lies, because he’s definitely not sharing his deep, fizzy thoughts with anyone, let alone these two. “So, bowling?”

“Movie, actually,” Nate informs him. Wade hates for a second that his throat dries out like the Sahara desert at the low rumble of that man’s voice. “Tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, sure, I—” he starts to answer—because of _course_ he’ll catch a flick with his work friends and mock Bobby’s pathetic loneliness the whole time—but then, he stops. He stops, both his buddies frown at him, and he scratches his neck a second time. At the rate he’s going, he’ll dig right through to the muscle, but he can’t really help it. “I, uh, can’t go tomorrow night.”

He thinks he should maybe be offended by the skepticism that blooms all over Bobby’s face. “You can’t,” he says. Really, no, he _says_ it. It is in absolutely no way a question.

“Yeah,” Wade answers anyway, because they’re staring at him. They’re staring, and he feels like an ant under a magnifying glass, ready to be sizzled up by the sun. He hates the way he feels his cheeks flush, he hates that his fingers keep digging into his own skin, and he hates when Nate rolls his lips together into something that a human might call a disappointed frown. 

He shifts in his chair.

His friends keep _watching_ him.

And that’s when he says, without even really thinking about it, “I have a date.”

It’s stupid, too, because there’s no bolt of pride in those words. There _should_ be. He should be shouting it from the rooftops, buying ad space in the newspaper, hiring a freaking sky-writer. Darcy is beautiful and smart, she’s witty and geeky, she’s everything that a one-balled defense attorney like him should want in the world, but—

But life’s weird.

And he kind of sounds like he’s announced he actually likes the dentist or something.

Bobby blinks. Just the once, like an anime character, he blinks across the desk at Wade. “You,” he says, and every ounce of that syllable is candy-coated in doubt and disbelief, “have a date.”

Wade forces his hand away from the back of his neck. Last thing he needs is self-inflicted claw marks when he’s about to go out with a girl who he hopes might eventually leave him with _her_ claw marks instead. Maybe. 

“Yeah.”

“With a girl?” Bobby presses.

Wade snorts and rolls his eyes. It feels weird, though, forced and measured rather than natural, and tossing his head improves absolutely nothing. “Of course with a girl,” he returns, too fast and too snappy to sound even remotely genuine. “I swear, I point out _one time_ that Steve Rogers is hot—”

“One time?” Bobby questions.

“—and suddenly I’m part of your big gay pride parade.” Wade points a finger at him. “Heterophobia is a _thing_ , Drake.”

Bobby heaves a sigh. “I cannot have this conversation a second time,” he complains, head shake and all. “Even if you’re joking, I _cannot_ —”

“Congratulations.”

The comment’s more a murmur than anything else, a little lilt of that usually-deep voice Wade’s so used to and distracted by, and he jerks his head away from Bobby right as Nate’s rising from his chair. He definitely owns the world’s best poker face, always scarily-even and android-sharp, but Wade thinks for a second that maybe the edges of that mask are starting to flake and peel a little. Because for a second, standing there in front of his desk, Nate looks older and tighter than on an average day, and it’s—

Well, Wade’s pretty sure there’s no technical term for it, but it’s definitely not _normal_.

“I, uh, thanks?” he attempts, but Nate’s just _standing_ there, marble-chiseled and immobile.

At least, he’s standing there up until when he mutters something about a phone call and excuses himself without once glancing back into the room.

The silence that falls over them—really, that flops down on top of them like one of those ragdoll cats, all eager to be noticed—feels like it’s lead-based and weighs about a thousand pounds. Wade keeps staring at the door, expecting Nate to pop back in with some smart-ass comment or an apology, but—

Like he said, Nate’s not entirely human.

These shenanigans just proved all that, really.

But because Bobby’s still quiet—quiet and watching Wade like he’s about to pull a rabbit out of the hat he’s definitely not wearing—he throws up his hands and announces, “So, that was weird.”

Bobby snorts and shakes his head. “Was it?” he asks. He starts levering himself out of his chair, all slow and deliberate. Wade thinks he’s maybe using his body language to make a point, which is pretty weird.

Right up Bobby’s alley, sure, but still weird.

Wade frowns at him. “What?” he replies, but Bobby shrugs. He dips his hands in his pockets, pauses, and parts his lips. Wade really suspects some noise, some _sound_ to fall out of him, but instead, he shakes his head. Again. He’ll probably give himself a brain aneurysm if he keeps that up.

“Okay, seriously, _what_?” Wade repeats. It only makes the head-shaking worse.

Bobby starts trudging toward the doorway, slow and steady like that stupid turtle in the stupid fairy tale, and Wade decides that’s absolutely fine. He dips his head back down to his police reports, finds his highlighter, and jumps right back into work. He certainly doesn’t need Bobby to say anything, to harass him with unsolicited advice, or to clue him in on what’s up with all the dramatic staring and meaningful head-shakes.

Nope.

Doesn’t need or want any of that.

Except when he glances up a second later for no particular reason (shut up, there’s really no reason), Bobby’s still there, standing in the doorway with a hand on the jamb. 

“ _What_?” Wade demands for what feels like the tenth or eleventh time, and he seriously considers beaning Bobby with the highlighter. “If you’re thinking it, just _say_ it. Put me out of my misery, because I don’t—”

He stops before his rant grows too big and noisy, but only because of Bobby’s lips. Because Bobby presses his lips into this tiny, worried line, one like he really wants to ask a question. Wade’s not sure why he assumes there’s a question instead of some smart Bobby Drake “word of wisdom” or whatever, but the notion sits in the bottom of his stomach like a boulder and he really just wants Bobby to _ask_.

“I thought,” Bobby _finally_ starts, but then his mouth presses into another, tighter frown. “Never mind.”

“Never mind _what_?” Wade presses. He sounds annoyed, he _knows_ he sounds annoyed, but he cannot help it.

“Nothing,” Bobby returns. He holds onto the doorjamb a little tighter, like he might fall over without the weird clinging. “Have a good date.”

“Yeah, I will,” Wade shoots back, but he’s weirdly sure Bobby means something very different.

 

== 

 

“You’re officially insane, aren’t you?” Clint demands, and Wade rests his head against the side of his fridge.

Don’t share this with the class (or at least, with his coworkers), but Wade’s actually exhausted. He’d felt it seep into his bones the second he unlocked the door to his apartment, and he’d barely dropped his bag and suit coat on the floor before he walked over and flopped onto his couch. He’d laid there for a long time, maybe entire hours or lifetimes, just reveling in the weird sticky feeling of the fake leather against his cheek and wondering where his life’d gone horribly wrong.

Which, by the way, was a stupid thing to wonder. His life, with his job and friends and upcoming date and really comfy faux-leather couch, it all kind of added up into a giant ball of awesome.

Except, during that hour or year of lying there, he’d felt like shit.

He’d purposely lurked in his office for an extra hour after Bobby disappeared, mostly in an attempt to avoid the collective weirdness of his coworkers. By the time he’d finally poked his head out into the hall, determined that the coast was clear, and wandered down the stairs to the building’s shared foyer, he’d felt better about the whole situation. After all, who cared if Bobby Drake—a man who’d gotten married before he was potty trained, more or less—looked all worried about his awesome date? Who cared if Nate—a guy who’d sworn off all human emotions as part of his deal with the god of protein shakes or whatever—turned to stone the second Wade announced that he planned to have a life? 

They, Wade’d decided on his way out the automatic doors, were idiots. Emotionally-stunted idiots without any romance in their souls. They probably didn’t even like _Twilight_.

He’d started whistling a merry song, too, until he’d realized Nate’s car was still in the parking lot, parked under one of the tall, yellowy lights. And all the merriness in his heart’d dried up like a Texan oil well when he’d realized Nate was there too, sitting in his car, scowling his way through a cell phone conversation.

Wade’d stood there for a long time, right in the middle of the wintery parking lot, staring at the shadows on the guy’s face.

But then, Nate’d spotted him, and he’d bolted for his own car so fast he’d nearly wiped out on an icy patch.

The weirdness, the bolting, the boundless supply of exhaustion churning around in his belly, it all sort of explained why he hadn’t bothered looking at the caller ID before he’d answered his cell phone—or why, now, he’s closing his eyes and resisting the urge to groan while Clint kind of—

Well.

As Clint kind of rants at him.

“It’s like mixing unstable bomb-making components, Wade!” Clint carries on, sounding more like Wade’s decided to date his barely-legal daughter instead of, you know, his trial assistant. Why is that? Why is it that Clint, who’s not really _that_ much older than Darcy (or Wade, really) thinks he can turn all paternal and weird? A question for the ages. “You think everything’s fine right now, but tilt the bottle a little, the wrong things rub up against one another and it explodes. And this time, it’ll explode all over my office, _your_ office, probably our friendship, and definitely the way other attorneys here view you.”

Wade closes his eyes. “When’d you learn anything about making bombs?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not,” he retorts, and only half because he feels like the fight’s slowly seeping out of him and onto the floor. He blames Bobby. Actually, no, he blames the combined evil powers of Bobby and Nate, like a joy-murdering Captain Planet. Maybe Clint’ll join their ranks after this. “I’m just trying to point out that there are lots of different types of explosive. Maybe we’re C4. I mean, I think C4’s the one you can light on _fire_ and still won’t blow up in your face.”

And he’s not really sure what exactly it is—whether it’s his tone of voice or the next breath he lets out or the fact that he’s not even turned on a light in his apartment since walking in the door—but Clint suddenly falls deathly quiet. Like, funeral procession quiet.

“Are you okay?”

Wade rolls his forehead back and forth against the cool metal of the fridge, the world’s weirdest head-shake. He knows he should probably shovel some food in his mouth, but he kind of wants to hole up in the darkest corner of his place and fall asleep that way. 

But Clint’s not exactly the friend you can explain all of that to, you know?

“I had the most fucked-up day at work in the history of fucked-up days at work,” he says instead, and finally reaches over to flick on the kitchen light. He regrets it immediately; the bulb burns his eyes while illuminating all the crumbs and crinkled gum wrappers and other general mess he sometimes leaves lying around. He starts sweeping all the debris into the sink. “Remember my hot-but-insane boss? Today, she was hot-but-insane to the _max_. Like, I think Urban Dictionary spontaneously created an entry about her. ‘Doin’ a Frost,’ they called it.”

Emma’s in Grant County for three days, attending a conference on superior appellate practice or some bullshit like that.

No one needs to tell Clint that.

“And then,” he continues, because otherwise Clint’ll start asking questions and he’d rather not manufacture details about his lie, thank you, “I was subjected to a half-hour of whining about how Bobby loses out on nerd-sex ‘cause his husband’s in medical school.”

He hears Clint sigh a little, a sign that maybe the cloud of weirdness and rage’s dissipating a little. Well, maybe. “Which one’s Bobby again?”

“Your younger, less-hot, more-married pants doppelganger.”

“Right.”

Wade leans into the fridge and starts dragging out supplies for dinner. He thinks maybe a sandwich, but the cold cuts are starting to grow something, so he lands on grilled cheese. Bonus points: his block of cheddar even still smells like it’s supposed to. 

Clint’s all silent again, though, which isn’t a super good sign. And is sort of the reason that Wade draws in a breath and says, “I’m not going to screw it up.”

He can practically hear Clint blink. “What?”

“Darcy.” He abandons the bread, cheese, and horseradish (yes, you absolutely do put horseradish on a grilled cheese sandwich, it’s the one true condiment) on the counter and hip-checks the fridge shut. His kitchen’s tiny, and moving through it is mostly a master class in all the awesome places you can bruise yourself. “I’m not going to break her heart and leave it on the side of the road like a flaming dumpster during a riot, okay? I respect her a little more than that.”

On the other end, Clint lets out a long breath. “I know that,” he says in the least-believable tone ever. Wade rolls his eyes as he drags a pan out of the cabinet. “At least, I thought I knew that. It’s just—” He suspects Clint’s shaking his head. “You ever worry about somebody without really being able to put your finger on why?”

Depends on whether those people moodily leave his office without any kind of explanation and then sit creepily in their dark cars when they should really be brooding back in their bat caves.

He picks at the Ziploc seal on the cheese bag. “Not really, no.” He pauses for a beat. “Then again, I’m friends with you, and you’re transparent enough with your manguish that—”

“Nice,” Clint interrupts, complete with this twist of amusement poking at the back of his voice, and Wade finally grins a little as he reaches for the butter-flavored spray that probably causes cancer. “Just do me a favor and look out for her a little, okay? If only ‘cause I’m paranoid and _manguished_.”

Wade lets out a sound that might, in some contexts, be considered a laugh. “That’s totally not a verb.”

“It’s not a _word_.”

“Urban Dictionary, C-dawg. Look it up.”

Clint finally laughs then, either at the whole conversation or just at the “C-dawg” portion of it, and Wade kind of grins as he sets the pan on the burner and tosses the bread in. He stares at the blank faces of the bread, like empty white palms held open and waiting, and listens to Clint’s laughter die down. 

He’s still holding onto the package of cheese when he offers, “I actually do like her, you know.”

There’s a half-second pause before Clint asks, “What?”

“Darcy.” He picks at the seal without opening it and stands there, staring at the stove. “She’s a good gal, you know? She’s funny, she’s pretty, she’s the whole package. And I should maybe stop looking around for packages that aren’t there and focus on ones that are.”

“I don’t—”

“I mean, let’s face it,” he interrupts, because he really doesn’t want to know where Clint’s going with that one, “Natasha’s hot and everything, but she’s no _Darcy_.”

Clint’s laughter sounds like cathedral bells, or at least, some kind of reprieve.

Wade finally smiles for real, after that.

 

==

 

That night, after a pretty burnt grilled cheese and five or six episodes of _Arrested Development_ , Wade flops along his couch and stares up at the ceiling, his cell phone resting on his forehead. He wants to call Clint up and jump back into their conversation, but then again, he also wants Clint to back off and not play the stand-in role of everybody’s babysitter and/or dad. He wants to text Bobby about that long, weird look, but then again, he also wants Bobby to stop meddling.

And Nate—

He’s only ever texted Nate two or three times, and he’s never actually gotten a text back.

He snatches up his phone and scrolls through all the names in his phone book until he finds the one he wants.

_u ever sit there n wondr if ur lifes about 10x messyer than u kno?_ he writes, and then purposefully sends it off before he can regret it.

His apartment’s dark and quiet, as small and lonely as a coffin, and he closes his eyes against the silence.

His phone jingles a good five or ten minutes later. The screen’s light feels white-hot when he picks it up and squints at it.

**Darcy:** _Only all the damn time. You good?_

Wade types _no_ about six different times, but he never sends it. Instead, he sends, _always. c u tmrw nite_

He tries to smile at the weird iPhone emoticon thing she sends back at him, but he really can’t.

Instead, he just lies there in the dark.


	3. Brute Animals and Other Creatures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, actions scream bloody murder and Wade (the man of action, remember?) regrets just about all of them. Luckily, not all who wander are lost—and not all who screw up monumentally are doomed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is brief mention of animal cruelty in this chapter. No details are provided, and no animals died. 
> 
> Thanks as usual to my girls, Jen and saranoh, who sometimes leave nearly identical comments while beta-reading (especially when those comments involve Wade bringing his laptop into the bathroom).
> 
> Important note: tags are subject to change as events in the story progress. What appears in the heading is not necessarily what will continue throughout the story. You will need to wait and see.

“No, but _seriously_ , you should’ve seen her face!” Darcy announces, her hand slapping the table and making their dishes and silverware all rattle together. Wade’s laughing hard enough that his stomach hurts, and more than once, he’s afraid that his pad thai might reappear just from the force of his laughter. Darcy’s mascara’s starting to gum up as she laughs at her own story, her voice raucous and warm as she regales him with the time she hid a plastic snake in Jane’s bed back when they shared a dorm room.

He’s ninety-nine percent sure that the entire restaurant hates the two of them, right about now.

He honestly could not care less.

The new Thai place clearly sprung up in an attempt to grab and hold onto the town’s college students, full as it is of modern styling and drinks with cute names, but the food’s fantastic and the company’s seriously a thousand times better than he’d hoped. Darcy wears her hair back in a braid that’s all Rapunzel-styled, full of ribbons and random other bits—a couple colorful paperclips, a plastic flower he’s pretty sure she stole off one of the fake plants in the judicial complex’s lobby, that kind of thing—that bobs when she shakes her head. Her fingernails are sparkly and silver to match the crisscross stripes on her sweater. A sweater that shows off a lot more pale skin than Wade’d prepared himself for, too, because _twice_ she’s snapped her fingers at him and pointed up at her eyes.

She’d laughed both times, though, so Wade’d only blushed, you know, all over every inch of his face.

Their half-finished appetizer of fried tofu and their mostly-finished plates of saucy meat and noodles are abandoned as Darcy continues her story. Wade’s only managed to follow a third of the whole thing—from what he caught, basically, Jane and her college boyfriend engaged in a lot of super-loud, super-acrobatic sex that’d kept Darcy up one too many nights. But instead of focusing on Darcy’s words exactly, he keeps focusing on Darcy herself: the braid, the fingers, the laughter, the way her whole body shimmies with delight as she moves on from the plastic snake to the plastic spiders.

Why he ever worried about this whole date thing, he’s not sure, because he feels so full of warmth and joy that he might actually puke all over the table.

In, you know, the best way possible.

Darcy’s story finishes with a flourish, and she reaches across the table to drag over and finish off the last couple pulls of her beer. Another reason to fall madly in love with her and offer her chubby dark-haired babies: girl knows her beer. “Okay,” she says once she’s finished, gesturing vaguely with the bottle. “Your turn.”

He blinks. “My turn what?”

Her _bitch, please_ face could probably kill a lesser man at twenty paces. Actually, Wade’s not entirely sure he’s not already dead. “I just sat here and told you about all the horrible forms of torture I used on Jane ‘I can put my legs behind my head’ Foster,” she informs him. She draws random shapes in the air with the neck of her beer bottle, and Wade tries not to stare at the lipstick print she’s left on the glass. “The least you can do is tell me a raunchy college sports story or _something_.”

He snorts a little and shakes his head. “Darcy, I played lacrosse,” he reminds her.

“So?”

“Lacrosse is the least raunchy, least _sexy_ college sport on the whole planet, except maybe competitive college chess or something.” Darcy laughs, her braid flipping over her shoulder as she rolls her eyes, but he holds up his hands. “Really,” he promises, and her eyes dance with mirth. “The marching band kids got more action than I did, back in college.”

He swears that she chokes on air at that one. “Really?” she demands. “Even with you looking like _that_?”

Her bottle jabs at the space between them, and Wade feels his cheeks start to warm again. He’d spent an hour that morning tearing apart his closet in a vain attempt to dig out his least-offensive outfit. He’d landed on a barely-patterned shirt and a tie that reminded him of something that nerdy _Criminal Minds_ doctor might wear, but hey, Darcy’d grinned and compared it to that Macklemore song about Goodwill. Not a total loss.

She’s grinning at him now, but there’s something suspicious in her expression, too, so he grabs at his water glass and helps himself to a monumental swallow. He’s already polished off a beer and then picked the label off of it in a fit of nerves. He’s a nervous drinker, so really, the water’s probably the best of all possible ideas. “If I’m being totally honest,” he starts, running his thumb through the condensation after he sets his glass back down, “I probably looked even more like _this_ back when I was on the team.” She quirks an eyebrow, and he shrugs a little. “My first three years, I was there on a scholarship. I worked probably harder than anybody else to _keep_ my ass on that team—and in school.”

Her grin slips a little, softening around the edges. She sets down her bottle carefully. “Because of the scholarship?” she asks, all quiet and gentle.

“Uh, because I was on varsity as a skinny little eighteen-year-old _shit_ ,” he informs her, and god, her laughter’s like the bells of Notre Dame, the way it rings out across the restaurant. The people at the closest table kind of shoot them a dirty look, but then again, they’ve spent the whole damn time glaring. Let them glare; they’re old and neither of them’s as hot as his date.

He’s thinking about what story to tell—because really, he’s got about a thousand, from the time when he stumbled drunk into the wrong dorm room and fell asleep on the bed to the one where he caught pneumonia from swimming naked in the river on a dare—when the waiter arrives with their check. The waiter’s been super patient with their laughing and inability to pick their entrees (seriously, they’d chatted instead of ordering), and he’s earned a massive tip.

And Wade’s about to tell him that when Darcy says, “Oh, sorry, we needed two tickets.”

The waiter’s mouth pops open, probably well on its way to a massive apology, but Wade snags the little black folder before anybody can really stop him. “We don’t,” he corrects, and Darcy blinks at him like he just owned up to some really serious crime. “My treat, and all that.”

The waiter nods and leaves them to it, but Darcy keeps staring at him. Even after he lifts an ass cheek, pulls out enough cash to cover the dinner and the tip, and shoves it all in together, she watches him like she’s never seen him before. He’d find it attractive if it also didn’t make him just a little nervous. “What?” he asks after long enough, when her expression’s starting to shift around into a frown. 

“We should at least split it,” she says, and she sounds super suspicious. 

“It’s no big deal,” he promises, but he feels the heat creeping out of his collar all of a sudden. He’d wondered a couple times whether Darcy realized he’d asked her out on a _date_ —oh, she looks like a million bucks and everything, but something about the way she’d talked about her college boyfriend and Jane’s past, uh, escapades kind of made him wonder. 

But then again, every time he’d started to ask, she’d nudged his foot with hers under the table, or touched his wrist when she laughed, and he’d totally forgotten how words worked all together.

Women, he decides right then, are confusing as fuck.

She pauses for a moment, but then nods as she reaches for her water. “So, raunchy lacrosse stories?” she prompts, and Wade grins.

“How about a raunchy after-a-lacrosse-party story?” he asks, and her snicker’s pretty much the perfect answer.

They stick around in the restaurant long enough to finish their waters and Wade’s story—“And lemme tell you, the worst part was when I figured out I was in the girls’ wing of the building!”—before emerging into the frigid January darkness. The sky’s spitting random little white-gray flakes that look more like ash than snow, and Darcy winds her scarf a little tighter around her throat as they wander out into the parking lot. The snow still sticks to her hair; when they step under the lights, they sparkle like glitter on her braid.

God, she’s _gorgeous_.

“Listen,” he says as she fishes her keys out of her bag, muttering under her breath about how the damn thing’s a TARDIS (you know, bigger on the inside). He’s almost outlined his entire speech in his head—awesome night, awesome girl, he’s super lucky, the whole nine yards—when she abandons her keys to glance up at him. The dark turns her big, soft eyes all doe-like and innocent and whitens up her skin until it’s like fresh-fallen snow, and Wade—

Wade knows better. Really. He absolutely, positively, eight-hundred percent knows that the order he should strive for is speech, permission, then the next step.

But instead of asking, he raises a hand, touches it lightly to Darcy’s cheek, and kisses her.

He aims for her mouth but somehow only catches the corner, a brush against lips and skin that simultaneously feels like too much and not nearly enough. The air around them smells of peanut sauce and Darcy’s light perfume, with maybe a twist of spice drifting out of the restaurant and the sharp chill of the air before a snow storm. Darcy stands stock still, almost frozen, and Wade waits with his eyes closed for her to tilt her head and meet his mouth.

Which is why he nearly falls flat on his face when Darcy jerks back a step.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demands. Her purse swings around in front of her body like a giant leather shield, and Wade purposely jumps back a step-and-a-half. A step-and-a-half, then two, then _three_ , just in case, and he almost trips backwards into a BMW. 

Darcy’s breath clouds in front of her face, angry pants that rush out and then dissipate. Wade swears he can hear his pulse in his ears, like a goddamn marching band beating out rhythms that he’s incapable of recognizing, and—

“Wade!” she shouts, probably to grab his attention.

“I was kissing you because that’s what you do at the end of a date!” he shouts back, which is not what he intended to say it all.

The words crack between them like thunder while the snow keeps drifting down, and for the first time in pretty much their entire friendship, Wade feels like just about the worst person ever. Because Darcy stands four steps away, mouth hanging open and eyes wide, and she looks absolutely spooked to the core.

Because he’s never so much as glanced too hard at a girl without express permission, and—

He drags his fingers through his hair. He’d spent the last fifteen minutes of his work day convincing it to sit right, and then throws the effort out the window in a mere three seconds. Not, he reminds himself, that it actually matters. “I,” he starts, but the words tangle around his tongue in this weird tourniquet. He swallows, wets his lips, and tries all over again. “We had a good time,” he finally manages, and shoves his hands in his pockets. “We laughed a lot, and with the snow and everything, you looked pretty, so I—”

“This was a date?” Her voice sounds raw, like she’s just sung a whole opera top to bottom. He purses his lips together, swallows again around the awful ball of bile and guilt stuck in the back of his throat, and nods. Darcy’s fingers start to uncurl from where she’s clutching her bag, but only barely. She reminds him of a deer that’s stepped out in front of a semi-truck.

Except for the part where in the battle of deer-versus-semi, nobody ever bets on Bambi.

“Wade,” she says quietly, and he realizes only when he raises his head that he’s been tracing the cracks in the pavement instead of tracing the shape of her face. Her soft, pale face with the pouty lips and long, dark lashes. The face framed by the loose wisps of hair like you’d expect from a Disney princess.

The face with a small, almost shy frown creasing every one of its delicate features.

“Wade,” she says again, and steps into the distance between them, “I— Look, we’re friends, we’re _good_ friends, but I don’t know if I want—” She shakes her head, loosening her scarf and showing off a tiny strip of pale throat. Wade’s fingers itch to reach out and fix it—he’s done it before, after trivia, a quick half-second adjustment—but suddenly, every half-second twitch feels like the first steps on the moon. She releases her bag to reach out and put a hand on his arm. “I—”

She tips her head up to meet his eyes—dangerous, given that the last time she tipped her head up in his direction, he reached out and kissed her—and he tries to force a smile. But trying never counts as _doing_ , and he knows from the way her frown deepens that his smile dies a noble death about two seconds in. Her fingers flex against the wool of his coat, an action he wishes were worth a thousand words, and he really wants to kiss her again.

His stomach’s either floating or sinking, and he hates that he can’t tell the difference. 

But before either of them figures out how to break the impenetrable wall of silence that’s sprung up between them, the fuzzy strains of some song spring out of Darcy’s bag. She swears and steps back, rooting around first in the main pocket and then all four ( _four_ ) side ones until she manages to dig out her cell phone. The song is that Coldplay one about science, and she scowls at the caller ID. “It’s the preggo,” she tells him. She thumbs the thing into silence, then casts her gaze up at him. For a second, he feels his breath seize up in his chest. “I should—”

“No, yeah. I mean, not no. Just yeah.” Wade frowns at the way all the words sort of jumble together, a big ball of uncertainty and almost-negatives. Darcy mirrors his expression, her brow crinkling, but he waves her off. “Chicks before dicks, and everything,” he says, and her frown deepens. When he steps back again, he runs into the stupid BMW. “Seriously,” he presses, because she’ll stare at him for an hour otherwise. “Go, I’m good.”

He’s almost certain she thinks he’s lying—good instincts on her part, really—but then her phone starts playing the stupid song again, a sure sign Jane’s hung up and called right back. Darcy heaves a sigh and flicks her finger across the screen before shoving the thing up to her ear. “I’m here, okay, I was finishing dinner,” she snaps, and turns back toward her car.

Wade fakes a smile at her back and waves one more time, just in case she glances back.

She doesn’t.

 

==

 

“I gotta say,” Clint says in his kind of breathless after-run way, wiping his forehead on his sweatshirt before he peels it off and throws it down the hallway, “I was pretty glad you didn’t cancel. After Darcy called in sick yesterday, I was afraid you’d be toast right along with her.”

Wade, like the martial artist and overall talented gentleman he is, runs into the wall.

In Wade’s defense, Phil Coulson’s stupid little house is designed a bit like a maze, with hallways that loop around indecisively and fail to ever point you in the right direction. The first time he’d ever visited Clint there, he’d needed directions to the bathroom three different times.

Granted, with hindsight retrospect and everything, he’d downed two energy drinks before muy thai that day, so really, the fact he’d remembered his _name_ while nursing that kind of caffeine rush was pretty impressive. 

Clint usually goes running with Phil these days, a sort of weird foreplay thing Wade tries not to think too hard about, but Phil’s off at some Saturday workshop-training mumbo-jumbo and Clint— Well, okay, Clint’s more like a herd dog than any human being Wade’s ever met, the way he craves exercise and activity. Even after running five miles, he bounces on the balls of his feet in Phil’s kitchen like somebody’s accidentally set his vibration setting one click too high.

Not that kind of vibrator. Mind out of the gutter.

Wade watches him, and the way his sweaty-ass t-shirt rides up as he leans down to fish a couple bottles of water out from Phil’s weird cabinet-of-hoarding, but only because his brain’s still processing the whole “called in sick” thing. 

Mostly because he hasn’t heard from Darcy since Thursday night.

Like, at all. 

After the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad almost-date ended, Wade’d beat feet home only to sit on the couch and stare at his laptop screen for a full six hours. Specifically, he’d stared at his Gmail chat contact list, willing Darcy to sign on. Not in a creepy way, of course, but in an apologetic, bound-and-determined-to-not-suck friendly way. A way guaranteed to comfort her after the uninvited kiss and the awkward staring and everything.

He’d even written up a post-it note of talking points and stuck it over the corner with all the dead pixels (thanks, gravity, for introducing his computer to the cold, hard tile of the bathroom floor). The list kind of looked like this:

1\. apologize  
2\. remind are friends  
3\. cat gifs  
4\. mock clint for something  
5\. promise to never ask out again

But, of course, Darcy never actually signed on.

She never signed on, or texted, or called, or employed any other means of communication that would suggest she continued to live and breathe. No Friday updates to “The Thorling Cometh” (the official Odinson baby tumblr) materialized, no pithy tweets appeared, no panicking soccer mom Facebook posts were thoroughly disproved by a quick Snopes-ing. No, instead, Darcy’d remained creepifyingly silent, and Wade—

Wade, in a totally mature and adult manner, had skipped out on trivia Friday night and spent the evening at home, watching reruns of _Swamp People_ on the History Channel.

“Heads up!” Clint shouts all of a sudden, and Wade sticks his hands up just in time to block— Nothing. Nothing flies toward his face, nothing threatens to bean him in the head, and when he blinks and unclenches, Clint grins across the kitchen at him. “Sorry,” he says without sounding even remotely sorry. He offers up a water bottle. “You weren’t responding.”

“You should be careful,” Wade challenges, snatching the bottle out of Clint’s grip. “I could’ve murdered you with my pinky.”

“Really,” Clint deadpans.

“Really.”

“Prove it next time.”

Wade shrugs. “Sure,” he replies, and Clint snorts before he cracks the seal on his own water and starts drinking.

Wade, on the other hand, peers at his bottle for a couple seconds, just in case. Clint’s sly. And sneaky. And also mean. Plus, he’s lured Wade into Coulson’s deceptively domestic Fortress of Solitude. Behind enemy lines, and all that.

And the longer he stares at his water without drinking it, the longer Clint stands there without continuing the aborted almost-conversation about Darcy. Wade’s a pretty big fan of quiet, actually.

But eventually, his throat starts to feel like sandpaper and his face loses that wind-chapped soreness and veers violently in the direction of “unhealthy flush,” so he abandons his pride and twists the cap off the bottle. He drinks half of it in greedy, dehydrated gulps, then sets it down on the counter and wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist.

Clint stares at him with those creepy all-observant eyes of his, but he keeps his mouth shut.

For about twenty more seconds.

“So,” he remarks, all conversational as he leans his sweaty back against the edge of Phil’s pristinely-clean countertop. “You didn’t catch Darcy’s flu or whatever?”

Wade knows his mouth’s dry—or, at least, he assumes it is—but he wipes his lips again anyway. Clint’s gaze bores into him like laser beams before he shrugs and answers, “No.”

“Then, how’d it go?”

He starts to lift his shoulders again, realizes he’s already shrugged the once, and settles for picking at the paper label on the bottle. “Fine.”

And Clint, because he actually prides himself on things like friendship and human decency, sighs. “C’mon,” he presses, shaking his head a little. When Wade tips his head back down to his bottle, the guy even reaches over and knocks his knuckles into his shoulder, a weak little play-punch. “I know I kinda shat on you about the whole thing, but Darcy— I dunno, she’s just _Darcy_.” He shrugs and leans back against the counter again. “And you’re, you know, _you_.”

Wade snorts something he really hopes sounds like a laugh. “Sex with Coulson’s destroying your vocabulary.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “I mean,” he clarifies, waving his water bottle in the space between them, “that it could get messy. Which, sure, relationships do, but—” Somehow, even though Wade’s avoiding it like the proverbial (and actual) plague, Clint catches and holds his gaze. “I give a damn,” he says, sounding sincerer than Wade’s maybe ever heard him sound. “And I worry.”

Wade’s never experienced having his heart dug out with a melon baller, but he imagines that it brings with it the same helpless breathlessness he feels right now. He swallows around the lump that starts climbing up out of his belly and into his throat. “It’s not worth it,” he finally says.

“Giving a damn?” Clint asks.

“Worrying.” Wade wets his lips and then forces himself into a couple seconds of eye contact. Clint’s face is tight, his eyebrows almost knotting together, and Wade ends up shaking his head. “I don’t think it was a date,” he admits.

The lines that pop up alongside Clint’s frown make the Jakarta trench look like a freaking fairway divot. “But—”

“She— I don’t know.” Shaking his head again feels stupid, but then, the label of his water bottle’s pretty much in shreds at this point. He sets it down on the countertop and drags his fingers through his hair. He wants to run another ten miles, to tire himself out until his brain’s blank and empty. He dries his sweaty fingers on his shirt, then rubs his face. “It was great,” he says after a couple seconds, “but then it got weird at the end. And I thought at first maybe it was just the kiss—”

“You kissed?” Clint interrupts.

“—but now, I think I managed to blow it on at least five other levels.” He shrugs and reaches for the bottle again. At least twisting the cap on and off provides a stupid distraction from the worried way Clint’s staring him down. “I think you were maybe right.”

A strangled sort of half-laugh noise claws its way out of Clint’s throat, and when Wade jerks his head up, Clint grins like he’s been lobotomized. “No, sorry,” he says, proof that Wade’s scowl’s exactly as deep and abiding as he’d suspected. “It’s just that, when it comes to relationships, I’m _never_ right. Like, ever. Ask Natasha. I mean, I spent six months pushing Stark and Bruce together, and look how that turned out.”

Wade opens his mouth to agree whole-heartedly—because, hey, he can count on about two fingers how often Clint’s admitted to being wrong—but then, he realizes what exactly Clint’s _said_. “Uh,” he replies, and then spends a couple seconds mentally back-tracking through the conversation, just to double-check. 

Then, finally, he observes, “You pushed them together, and they got married.”

Clint shakes his head. “Mostly because they waited to get together, I think,” he answers, and then downs the rest of his water. He swallows audibly, tosses the bottle into the garbage can (and makes it, somehow, even from all the way across the room), and then sighs. “Look,” he says after a couple seconds, “if things were weird, well, they were weird. But I think you need to ask yourself whether you like her enough to brave the weird and try again.” He gestures a little, a half-finished circle with one of his big hands. It’s stilted and uncertain, like he’s earned a green belt in Tony Stark’s hand-flap-fu but is still learning the rest of the moves. “Ask yourself whether she’s worth it, you know?”

The silence stretches between them, then, Wade staring at his water bottle while Clint watches a random corner of the ceiling. “We’re friends,” he replies after an unprecedentedly long time. His fingers curl around the plastic bottle until it crinkles and crackles. “Even if— Dating’s great and everything, but she’s worth it all the way around.” He snorts. “Well, if she doesn’t end up hating me forever.”

Clint, because he’s Clint, tosses his head and rolls his eyes in this big, overblown gesture. “She won’t hate you,” he scoffs.

Because, obviously, he missed the part where Darcy jerked back in disgust from an ill-timed kiss. They stare each other down for a minute. “You sure about that?”

“Wade,” Clint chides, more like he’s scolding Steve Rogers’s little kid than talking to one of his best friends, “I know Darcy. And I’m pretty sure the only way you end up on her most-hated list is when you talk shit about Doctor Who.”

Wade allows himself one beat of processing time. “You mocked Eleven in front of her again, didn’t you?” 

“He’s like an uncoordinated baby giraffe!” Clint defends, and for the first time in what feels like eons, Wade cracks a grin wide enough that it hurts his face. “What kind of defender of the universe is that, you know? And don’t get me started on that _Roman_ guy!”

Later, Wade wonders what it looked like when Coulson walked through the door fifteen minutes later to find his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s buddy practically on the floor, laughing about whether bowties are actually cool.

But that’s a whole other story.

 

==

 

“Look, it’s like I told that Brian dude—”

“Bobby,” Wade corrects for about the hundredth time in ten minutes.

“—I was drunk. Okay? I’m not totally sure what happened after the last cup of Jungle Juice or whatever, but I was super, _super_ drunk.”

Allan is twenty-three, pursuing a masters of fine arts with an emphasis in interpretive dance, and no, Wade is not shitting you, thanks. He lounges back in one of the conference room’s rolling chairs, his legs spread almost indecently and his weird plaid knock-off Converse high-top tapping a random pattern on the floor. The guy wears jeans so skinny that they’ve probably been diagnosed with an eating disorder, a sweater with a weird tribal-type pattern on it, a dirty-looking linen scarf with tattered edges, and thick-rimmed glasses. His dreadlocks more accentuate than complete the whole look, and he smells like pot.

Wade’s pretty sure that, if he asks, the guy’ll claim it’s patchouli.

Wade played varsity sports at a party school. He knows the difference.

Wade also suffers from a pounding headache right about now, thanks both to the contact high from Allan’s _eau de wacky tabaccy_ and the weekend’s general sleeplessness. Usually, Wade loves Monday mornings like he loves Mexican food and those Starbucks refresher drink things: new cases, new challenges, new adventures for the new week! Today, he’s wasted most his time staring out the window and willing a comet to fall on the building next door.

Not on his building. He wants to live to tell the tale and all that.

He just really wants the day to end. Shut up, he knows it’s eleven-thirty in the morning.

He rubs his temple, fully aware that Allan’s watching his every move with the practiced disinterest shared by all entitled twenty-something shitheads, and glances back at the charging document in front of him. He’d found the whole thing—Allan’s referral form, the intake, and the charging document—on his desk that morning, along with a scribbled-on post-it. He’d twisted and turned the note in about eight different directions before he’d finally interpreted the symbols and scratches as the words _good luck_ followed by a capital letter C.

Carol really needs a tablet of that paper with the dotted lines to improve penmanship.

Of course, right now, Wade’s not so much worried about Carol’s chicken scratch—though, really, someday a cop’ll arrest her for forgery of her own signature—but the official charging papers. You know, the ones that name Allan specifically, and the date and time of the offense, and say that he—

“You know this is serious, right?” Wade asks after he finally drags his eyes away from the document. “I mean, your criminal history’s non-existent, but this is—” And he swears, he always exceeded in the parts of law school that required clear, concise sentences, but he’s officially out of words for this situation. “The misdemeanor animal cruelty, we can deal with that, but the felony—”

He triple-checks the document.

Not a single word’s flipped around on him in the last minute and a half.

“It’s serious,” he finally decides, because even Perry Mason’d turn mute at this bullshit.

“I know,” Allan replies. Wade suspects he might have bells woven into his dreads, because something jangles when he shakes his head. “And I also know that men of the law struggle to question the authority of our so-called democratic ‘government.’”

For the record, he employs the air quotes.

And for the record, Wade blurts, “What?”

The kid rolls his eyes, a sure sign that he’s completely fucking clueless about the entire situation, and Wade considers beating his forehead against the damn table. His own forehead, not Allan’s, though on second thought, he maybe ought to be equal opportunity about the whole thing. Two instances of brain damage for the price of one, and Wade might finally forget about the last four days of radio silence from Darcy.

Oh, what, did he forget to mention that part? The one where, Saturday night, he’d laid awake for half the night, staring at the ceiling and trying to compose a text message that said all things that’d jumbled together in his head? Because he’d spent hours trying not to remember Darcy’s scent or her soft lips, then twice as long trying to forget the shock as she jerked away from him, and it’d all culminated in a string of characters fumblingly typed into a “new message” window. He’d considered just deleting the stupid thing close to a million times, and all while the incident on Thursday and then the conversation with Clint played back in his head, fuzzy and foggy like a crappy old VHS tape.

But he’d sent the text. And he’d spent Sunday afternoon beating Mario Galaxy and waiting for Darcy to reply.

Yeah, guess which of those two things never happened.

He’d slept horribly Sunday night, battled his snooze alarm three times before dragging his ass out of bed, and nearly nodded off again during a searing-hot shower. An extra-large McDonalds coffee and a McMuffin later, and he’d started to feel better. Not all the way human, but at least functional. 

And now, he’s watching some dumbass interpretive dancer with bells in his dreads rant about his Constitutional rights, his foot tap-tap-tapping the beat to what Wade suspects is the Macarena, and—

“Just fucking stop!”

His voice cracks across the conference room, thunder-clap sharp and twice as a loud, and Allan jerks hard enough in his chair that he almost topples the damn thing over. The glasses magnify his eyes until they’re bug-wide, full of terror as much as shock, and Wade glances down at the table to discover it’s further away than it used to be. Further away, and his fingers are spread against the wood, and his palms hurt from slapping it.

Since, you know, he slapped the table.

While rocketing to his feet and shoving his chair all the way back against the far wall.

Oh.

He swallows awkwardly, still hearing the rush of blood and frustration in his ears, and then sort of clears his throat. Allan’s knuckles slowly regain their color as he unclenches his fists from the arms of his chair, but he stays quiet.

And still. No more jangling or tapping.

Okay, Wade can work with this.

“Listen,” he finally says, once he’s caught his still-spinning chair and dragged it back over to the table. He flexes his fingers just to remind himself they work before he slowly lowers himself back into his seat. “This isn’t about your rights, this isn’t about the ‘man’ keeping you ‘down’—” He elects against the finger quotes. “—and this really isn’t even about you being drunk. This is me, right now, sitting in front of you to explain your charges so that when we go into court for the first time, we’ve got our stories straight. Okay?”

He wonders for a second whether Allan’s wet himself, because he shifts uncomfortably before he nods. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Wade pulls in a long breath and looks at the charging document one last time. He tries to imagine the face Steve Rogers pulled when the police affidavit landed on his desk and how red he turned as he started leafing through the least-used pages of his statute book. At least, Wade certainly hopes they’re the least-used pages.

Bucky’s an attractive guy, all things considered, so it’s not like their sex life needs spicing up or anything. Well, one assumes.

Allan shifts again. Wade really suspects he’s demonstrating his potty dance.

“You’re charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty and—” Deep, even, grown-up breath. “—felony bestiality.”

Wade’s not entirely sure whether it’s actually hearing the words aloud, one after another—felony, then bestiality, each said with an absolute straight face and a sense of impending dread—or the little outburst from a couple minutes ago that does it, but either way, Allan nods like he’s about to be marched down the green mile. “I didn’t do anything to that goat,” he promises. His face blanches, all of his competitive Frisbee golf tan slowly seeping away. “I was wasted, but I swear, I didn’t do _anything_ to the goat.”

“We’ll, uh, figure that out at our next meeting,” Wade replies. He considers touching Allan on one of his obscenely-spread knees, sort of lightly soothing him, but then he remembers the charging sheet and decides against it. The words _to carnally know a brute animal in any matter_ shine white on the back of his eyelids, like staring into the sun.

He really should’ve considered maritime law. Or work with a boring-ass administrative agency. Or whatever any of his coworkers spend their lives doing. Anything but defending—

“Did he fuck the goat?” Carol asks ten minutes later, once Allan’s out the door and zipping into the January afternoon on his _Vespa_ and proving once and for all that he’s just one big cliché orgy. Either way, she looms in his doorway, her shoulder pressed to the jamb and her arms crossed over her chest while Wade deletes his e-mails. Aggressively deletes his e-mails, because shooing Allan out the door starts the VHS-tape replay bullshit all over again, and he’s tired of it.

He’s tired of the way Darcy’s voice stuck in her throat Thursday night, at the serious expression on Clint’s face Saturday morning, and of the sinking feeling in his gut every time he picks up his phone and discovers exactly zero new text messages.

“Last time I checked—and, I mean, I could be wrong here—you’re not the criminal defense attorney.” The delete key refuses to clack loudly enough to comfort him, so he reaches for his mouse. The subtle clicking sure as hell beats out the silent key-mashing. “Leave my referrals alone.”

Even without looking up, he knows Carol rolls her eyes. One of these days, she’ll blind herself from all that eye-rolling, head-tossing, and general Carol Danvers bitchery. Wade’s undecided on whether he’ll send her a get well soon card. “Who could resist checking that shit out?” she asks. He focuses on his rapidly-emptying inbox, but he feels his jaw tighten. “Even Bobby’s itching to know. _Bobby_. I think he’s up for sainthood.”

“What am I up for?” Bobby asks. He pops into the doorway just as Wade flicks his eyes over, and wow, the urge to bash his head against his desk rises up pretty quickly. Carol steps into his office, leaving room for Bobby to follow.

Neither asks permission or whether they’re bothering him.

Wade hates them just a little bit, right now.

“Sainthood,” Carol answers.

Bobby frowns. “I think you need to be Catholic,” he replies. 

Wade wonders how hard a smack is required for unconsciousness. One hard blow? Two? Should he aim for his temple?

Still standing near the doorway, Carol waves a hand vaguely. Summoning up some kind of special air force evil, no doubt. “They’d probably make an exception for you, what with your khakis and your marriage and your shiny-happy disposition.”

Then again, Wade thinks his window might open far enough for him to throw himself out onto the sidewalk. A twenty-foot drop only breaks bones, right? No imminent death? Just blissful unconsciousness and freedom from annoying, nosy coworkers who he usually enjoys but after last night’s—

“Hey, speaking of marriage,” Bobby cuts in, rudely interrupting Wade’s inner monologue, and Wade feels his lungs seize up. Bobby’s standing behind one of the chairs that face his desk, a file under one arm and the fingers of his hand—his stupid ring hand with his stupid wedding ring—resting on the back of the other. He drums them along the thin upholstery a few times, the slow beat of the snare before the military-style execution.

Hey, Wade likes Revolutionary War movies, okay?

He watches Bobby’s fingers first, then studies the curve of his arm and the jut of his shoulder before finally, gratefully, meeting Bobby’s eyes. They’re curious eyes, big and soft and deserving of all the sappy-ass love poems Doctor Perfect undoubtedly writes about them, but they’re also perceptive. 

Or at least, Wade hopes so. Because with all his heart, mind, body, and soul, he stares into those eyes and wills Bobby to ask any question in the universe besides _how’d your date go?_

So, of course, Bobby asks, “How’d your date go?”

There’s a probably-suspicious half-second pause before Wade answers, “Fine.” He spits the word, quick as a bunny and then quicker. The problem with it, though, is that it’s right-away overshadowed by Carol asking, “Date? What date?”

Yeah, Wade’s definitely going to throw himself out the window, now. No hesitation, even. Somebody let Clint know he can have all the yoga pants that’re hanging in his closet. 

“Wade had a date last week,” Bobby explains while Wade mentally draws up his last will and testament. The little shit’s smiling about it, too. “Blew off plans with Nate and me and everything.”

“Technically, you asked _after_ I had the date planned,” Wade points out. What? Even a soon-to-be-maimed man deserves the chance to defend his honor.

“Wait, so, this actually happened?” Carol demands. Wade resists the urge to roll his eyes. “With a human being?”

“With a _girl_ ,” Bobby says, then pauses. “Well, he said it was with a girl.”

She snorts and shakes her head. “Lose the gay-tinted glasses, Bobs.”

“Pretty sure he’s just serving as an ambassador for his people,” Wade notes. Come to think of it, he’s got at least a dozen porn DVDs he can leave to Bobby. A couple of them might be right up his alley, figuratively _and_ literally.

Bobby rolls his eyes at the whole “ambassador” thing and mutters some snide comment under his breath—probably a zinger, because he likes to keep those to himself and save them for later—but Carol ignores him. Carol ignores everything, actually: the clunking of the radiator, the way Wade drops his gaze down at his mostly-clear desk, the slow trek of their planet around the sun. No, instead, she focuses on stalking across the office like a cougar on the prowl, planting her hands on the back of one of the chairs in front of Wade’s desk, and leaning in. The whole thing’s predatory, hungry like the wolf and twice as fierce, and Wade swallows as he lifts his head.

Any attempt to joke about how he can see right down her shirt to her ridiculous yellow bra fails, too, she’s staring at him so hard.

Letter opener to his own eye socket might do the trick.

“You,” she says, the word itself serving as punctuation, “had a date. With a female human.” He feels instantly like she’s interrogating him, pumping him for information rather than just repeating Bobby’s words with slightly different emphasis. “And because of it, you blew off the Hankosexual—”

“Hey!” Bobby protests, but then his offended face falls right off. “Wait, the what?”

“—and the asexual man-mountain to do it.”

Wade wastes two seconds processing what Carol’s said before he huffs half a laugh and shakes his head. “Please,” he retorts, because _please_. “I am about 110 percent sure that Nate’s anything _but_ asexual.”

Bobby immediately nods so emphatically that Wade thinks his head might pop off like in that dandelion game kids play. “Have you _seen_ him?” he demands, all well-meaning Bobby Drake enthusiasm and earnestness. Earnestness that, by the way, works wonders in a staff meeting but that totally fails in this context, because Carol’s brow creases and he suddenly becomes the victim of her razor-sharp attention.

He pinks, then, but only around the edges. “Sorry,” he murmurs in a tone that’s less sorry and more embarrassed as all hell and then some, “but— I mean, I—”

“Have a type?” Carol finishes. Bobby pinks up the rest of the way. She releases the back of the chair and lazily flaps a hand. “Less about you, more about the hot date.”

Wade knows he’s nothing like Bobby—not in demeanor, not in complexion, not in well-meaning and disgusting genuineness—but he certainly feels it for the couple seconds after Carol’s comment. Because warmth rushes up his neck, his fingers turn twitchy and unreliable, and all of a sudden, he finds himself staring at his desk calendar.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s a nice calendar, you know? Loyal. Reminds him of all sorts of appointments, like his weekly muy thai sessions with Clint. The next big trivia event with the Learned Hand Jobs, he’s scrawled that in there. His upcoming hearing dates. Payday! He loves payday.

Bobby coughs a little, like something’s caught in his throat. “Wade?” 

Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday, that’s on there. Important for all those, you know, civil rights, uh, _things_. And look, the full moon’s marked, too. Plus, there’s a scribble in the margin that he thinks is maybe a reminder to clear out his DVR. Or, wait, no, could be a smear of salsa.

He considers licking it to find out.

And, of course, there’s last Thursday’s—

“Okay, seriously,” Carol attempts after several more seconds, seconds Wade spends studying the blue-ink scrawl of his own handwriting. Out of the corner of his eye, he can watch her throw up her hands. “What, are you catatonic or something? Should we be calling—”

“God, the date was _fine_ , okay?” 

The words snap into being like a whip-crack, sharp and snippy in a way that can’t even be construed as mildly polite, and he knows it. But he’s just so _tired_ , today. He’s physically tired, exhausted to the bones thanks to crappy non-sleep and his damn potential felon of a client, but he’s _emotionally_ tired, too. He’s tired of feeling like a creep, like a loser, like a guy who doesn’t even deserve a reply to a text. A text he poured his damn heart into, a text that _mattered_.

“Are you—”

“Why can’t anyone in this office ever just leave shit alone?” he demands, and for once, Bobby clamps his stupid, well-meaning mouth shut and freezes where he stands. Wade shoves his chair back and pushes himself to his feet. Problem is, there’s nowhere to _go_. Bobby and Carol both loom like weeping angel statues, perfectly still and almost as deadly, so he just kind of tosses up his hands. “It’s always the same around here, it’s noses in each other’s business and mocking marriages—”

“Well, just Drake’s,” Carol observes.

“—and poking fingers in the sore spots. It’s fucking _annoying_.” He drops his arms to his sides. “I had a date,” he says, and he tries to ignore the way it sits in the back of his throat like a led weight. “I had a date, it was a fine date, and now it’s a date that’s _over_. And instead of talking about it and analyzing it and telling you every detail about the texture of our peanut sauce, I am going to work on defending my goat-fucker, okay?”

The words hang in the air after they’re all out there in the open, lead balloons that Wade expects’ll come crashing to the ground the second he inhales. Except he inhales, exhales, and inhales again, and everything just remains the same. A perfect standstill, Carol with her hands on the back of the chair, and Bobby sort of tangling his own fingers together until they’re pretty much knotted. Nobody says a word.

At least, not until Bobby nods, a juddering bob of his head, and says, “Okay.” It’s hardly above a murmur, but it comes complete with a careful little glance in Wade’s direction. Wade watches his shoulders draw up, ready for some other comment, but none comes.

Meanwhile, Carol releases a disgusted-sounding scoffing noise, whirls on her heel, and storms out of the room.

Wade drops his eyes to his desktop and contents himself with listening to their retreating footsteps.

His cell phone’s in the middle of his calendar, ignored for the first time all morning, and he reaches down to toy with it. He tips it up onto a single corner and balances it there; he lays it back down and spins it around. It skids across the paper, then slows to a stop. He’s just about to grab it again, actually, when somebody says, “Wade.”

“What?” he snaps, too sharp to even land in the ballpark of basic human decency, and he jerks his head over toward the doorway. He assumes it’s Bobby again, returned with some word of wisdom or uncontrolled concern, but it’s not.

No, instead, it’s Nate.

Nate, wide as the Nile and as sturdy as a redwood tree, standing in his doorway.

Nate, who also acted weird with him last week. Maybe there’s something in the Suffolk County water supply. He should petition for environmental testing.

He drags a hand through his hair. “Sorry,” he mutters. The longer Nate stares him down, the more he feels like he’s on the last bits of oxygen in the room. “What’s up?”

Rather than answer, Nate studies him for a moment. That’s really the only way to put it, to describe the slow trek of those careful eyes up and down the length of his body; Nate worries his lips into a line, sets his jaw tight, and studies Wade like he’s a French painting. 

And Wade, mature as he is, drops his eyes back down to his cell phone. When he swipes through the touch pattern to unlock it, it displays the same screen as it has for the last day and a half, save for when he ordered a Sunday night pizza. 

**Me:** _sry if i screwed up. ur my friend. i dnt wanna lose that. if u dont wanna go out ok but lemme kno we r cool. k? lemme kno we r still good. cuz i care abt u and shit_

He’s still rereading the message when Nate says, “There’s an improbably attractive woman asking for you down in the lobby.”

For a second, Wade swears he’s hallucinating, or maybe still suffering from the goat-molester’s contact high. He lifts his head in Nate’s direction, but neither of them says anything. They don’t blink, either, but just watch one another in the silence of Wade’s office.

Nate’s lawyer face reveals absolutely nothing.

Wade wonders exactly how much of his heart he’s wearing on his wrinkled sleeve.

But then, Nate wets his lips and adds, “She’s called Darcy.”

And Wade, he just sort of runs for it.

Leading men in the movies always sexy it all up, rushing dramatically toward their lady-loves, but not Wade. No, Wade knows he looks mostly like a deranged, disabled antelope trying to outrun a lioness, but he’s not sure he cares. He knocks into Bobby and Carol’s shared secretary outside Bobby’s office, not sticking around to help her pick up the massive pile of files that end up on the floor. On the stairs, he loses his footing and almost falls out of his shoe; he skips the last three steps and lands so hard on the hard tile floor that his knees shake. He stands there for a second, halfway between the door to the lobby and Emma’s office, and Emma’s assistant stares at him as he straightens his tie, unrolls his sleeves, and checks his collar. 

His palms feel sweaty, so he wipes them on his pants. He swallows around the stupid, nervous lump in the back of his throat, too.

You know, just in case.

Since they share the building with a family therapist and a certified public accountant, the lobby’s one of those big fancy ones, filled with plush leather couches, actual plants, and really classy magazines. The receptionist stops arguing on the phone with her boyfriend long enough to flash Wade a grin and sort of wave her hand in the direction of the chair closest to the window, but he ignores it. It’s not like he’s forgotten what Darcy looks like in the last four days, or like he could miss her ridiculous knitted cap.

It’s made out of yarn that changes colors as you go, a whole rainbow on the top of her head, and she’s embellished it with silly sparkly pom-poms. Her thick winter coat’s draped over the arm of the chair, revealing that she’s worn a hot-pink cardigan that catches the sunlight and creates a pink haze around her.

Well, haze or halo.

She’s also staring out the window, which means she only notices him when he flicks the pom-pom closest to her ear. She jumps in surprise and spins around fast enough that she kicks the paper bag at her feet.

The paper bag from Chipotle, one that sends up whiffs of the sweetest-smelling foodstuff known to mankind: burritos.

Wade sucks in a deep breath.

Not because of the burritos! No, sorry, stay with him here, the breath and the burritos are separate. No, he sucks in a breath because Darcy’s face is soft and pale in the sunlight through the window, her dark hair hangs in these ringlet curls, and her pouty lips start to twist into a tiny smile. Twist, hesitate, and then finally commit. It feels private, like it only belongs to the two of them, and Wade’s toes curl in his shoes.

“Hey,” she says quietly. 

He swallows. “Hey.”

“I, uh, I brought you lunch.” Darcy gestures toward the bag at her feet, and Wade leans over far enough to peer at the deliciousness inside: two foil-wrapped burritos, a bag of chips, a side of salsa, the whole nine yards. “I mean, I brought both of us lunch, if you wouldn’t mind having lunch with me.”

“Cool,” Wade says dumbly, but then everything she’s said sort of rushes up to meet him. They’re closer than they maybe need to be, thanks to the whole “leaning in” thing, and he swears he can count her individual eyelashes. Her eyes are large and dark, like a deer’s, and he wonders whether you can drown just by looking at someone.

She worries her too-pink lips, and he ends up swallowing again. “I mean, yeah,” he says.

“Yeah?” she echoes.

“Yeah,” he repeats, and bumps their shoulders together. For the first time since the whole incident in the parking lot, she grins like she means it. She slugs him in the side a little, he cringes and ducks out of her way, and they end up almost forgetting her coat in the lobby because they’re laughing at one another.

They steal sodas out of the fridge in the break room that’s shared between all the offices in the building—“I think they belong to the therapist,” he admits, “but I don’t think she cares”—and camp out up his office to eat their burritos. He barricades the door with a chair, Darcy pulls up the weird Queen Victoria episode of _Doctor Who_ on Netflix—“It’s this one or the weeping angels,” she threatens, and Wade throws up his hands in defeat—and that’s how they spend the first fifty minutes of Wade’s lunch break: feet up on his desk, chips balanced on his keyboard tray, watching sci-fi and gorging themselves on Mexican food.

If Wade glances over a few too many times just to catch her smile, well. You can’t really prove that in a court of law, now can you?

The episode’s nearly over and the chips almost totally gone with Darcy starts playing with the tab on her soda can. “Listen,” she says after a couple seconds of idle fidgeting. “I was kind of a jerk the other night, and I maybe overreacted.”

“Maybe?” Wade jokes. He knocks their elbows together, but she just snorts and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her expression hardens, more serious than he’s ever seen her, and he feels his shoulders drop. “Hey,” he says, and touches her elbow instead of bumping it. She lifts her head. “I’m pretty sure that asking a girl out without telling her you’re asking her out’s about the worst form ever. We’re at least tied for ‘suckiest choices ever.’”

He swears his chest tightens when she starts to smile. “You forget how stupid-competitive I am,” she points out.

He laughs and rolls his eyes. “Uh, I was there when you drenched the captain of the Armed Bears in cheap wine just ‘cause she snaked your trivia answer,” he reminds her, and her smile blooms into a full-out grin. “If that didn’t clue me into how fucking crazy you are, I don’t know _what_ would.”

“Hey, I said competitive, not crazy.”

“Babycakes, they’re _so_ the same thing.”

He lisps it on purpose and embellishes it with a little wrist-flip, and Darcy bursts out laughing. She reaches to pinch him in his muffin top, but he scoots his chair a couple inches out of the way. She overbalances, nearly tumbles out of her seat, and ends up catching herself on his knee. Her fingernails dig into his pants, but not in an uncomfortable way. 

Actually, it’s a lot more comfortable than it should be.

When she stops laughing and glances up at him, Wade thinks maybe it might even count as _too_ comfortable.

She tastes like salsa when she kisses him, all spices and cilantro, and Wade ends up curling his fingers helplessly around the arm of his chair rather than reaching for her. He only overcomes the bolt of shock—and terror, terror’s there too, just a smidge—enough to start closing his eyes before she pulls away and shoves herself back into her chair.

He thinks she looks as surprised as he feels, her deer-eyes wide and her hands sort of clenched together in her lap.

“For the record,” Darcy says, because something needs to cover the sound of the _Doctor Who_ end credits, “I really only came here to apologize and maybe ask you if we could try out a second date. Not to—”

She waves a hand between them, and for the first time, Wade realizes that she’s flushed pink. Pink from the neckline of her Batman t-shirt to her hairline, and not just from her cardigan-halo. 

Wade watches her for a moment, watches the pom-poms on her hat bob while she sweeps her hair over her shoulder and her fingers fidget uneasily against one of the buttons on her sweater before he thinks to say, “Third.”

She blinks. “What?”

He knocks their knees together, the lightest of touches, and then shrugs. “Spicy Mexican lunch totally counts as our second date.” The corners of her mouth twitch in this delightful, addicting, _tempting_ way. He wonders whether there’s some kind of protocol for stealing another kiss during the same awkward conversation. “But don’t worry,” he adds, “I’m classy as hell and won’t put out until at least the fifth.”

Darcy’s laugh tinkles like the bells in Allan’s stupid dreadlocks. “Really.”

“Really,” he promises, and he steals a chip off her foil while she grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although the posting schedule for this story will remain biweekly (as originally promised), next week I will be posting a one-shot called "In re the Adoption of Miles Morales." Please be on the lookout for that story!
> 
> Also, June 23 is the one-year anniversary of the day I started writing the MPU--that is, it is the date I created the first word document for what I thought would only be a short Clint/Phil one-shot--so if you have any suggestions for anniversary celebrations, please let me know!


	4. Bodies in Motion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade spends a lot of time talking about his girl-space-friend. He’s okay with that, though. Mostly because it’s that, or talking about the project Emma’s just assigned him and Nate, and, well, he and Nate are presently not doing so well on the talking thing. Additionally, Bobby Drake is a jerk, but what else is new?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A stipulation is an agreement between two parties in a court case.
> 
> A suppression hearing occurs when the defense attempts to get evidence thrown out because the police or another state agent acted illegally. (Think, for example, of the classic _Law & Order_ illegal search.)
> 
> A _pro se_ party is someone in a lawsuit who does not have an attorney. A _pro se_ form is, essentially, a legal form meant to be filled out by an individual without an attorney, rather than a form the attorney would prepare for the individual. 
> 
> There is a very brief moment of what might, if you squint, be considered mild misogyny? It is minor enough that I debated not mentioning it, but basically: Wade makes a joke using the title of a Dr. Dre song. No one thinks he agrees with the song. It is just Wade being Wade. (I feel like Wade himself requires a trigger warning.)
> 
> Jen and saranoh endured reading many chapters of absolutely unedited words in [Recorded Recollections](http://archiveofourown.org/works/852249/chapters/1629868) and have been kind enough not to point out any errors. And I am now kind enough to say: I really could not write this much with this many working pieces without them. They are wonderful.

“Your honor,” says Assistant District Attorney Bucky Barnes, his hands resting loosely on the podium as he addresses the court, “Mister Wilson wants the court to believe that his client the vandal—”

“Street artist,” Wade comments, leaning back in the stupid, uncomfortable vinyl chair. It creaks. They always creak.

Bucky twists to glance over in Wade’s direction. Wade smiles serenely at him. At least, he hopes it’s serene. He’s aiming for serene. In any case, it’s better than the twitchy-nervous almost-smile his client’s wearing like a Halloween mask.

Seriously, it borders on freaky.

Back at the podium, Bucky pulls in a breath. “And Mister Wilson,” he continues, almost like nobody interrupted him in the first place, “wants the court to take the leap in logic that a trained police officer who meets a teenager—a teenager carrying a duffel bag, actually—a half-block from a wall of _graffiti_ should—”

“Street art,” Wade cuts in. Bucky stops in the middle of his sentence to shoot Wade what a reasonable person might term a _really fucking nasty look_. Wade at least manages to hold up his hands in defense. “We stipulated,” he says, because he spent three hours writing and re-writing the stupid stipulation until it met all of Bucky’s ridiculous requirements.

“At trial, not in every hearing from now until—”

“Mister Barnes?” Wade can count on about two fingers the number of times Judge Brassels’s sounded annoyed in the past, and he thinks they’re inching toward number three. Because they’re the first hearing of the day, and they’re meant to be a quick-and-dirty visit to the world of evidence suppression, but—

Well, for one, Wade’s client showed up ten minutes late wearing a t-shirt that read _I taught your girlfriend that thing you like_ , so he’d wasted some time fixing that nightmare.

And for two, Bucky’s scowling like Wade’s just shot his cat. (At least, he thinks the Rogers-and-Barnes family owns a cat. A dog, maybe? No, Steve’s too anal-retentive for a dog, it’d have to be a cat.)

“Your honor,” Bucky says, his fingers clutching the sides of the podium a bit harder than necessary, “Mister Wilson and I filed a stipulation and agreed to refer to Mister Aguilar’s artistic expression as street art. I—” Wade swears he can hear the guy’s teeth grinding. “—misspoke.”

His tone is cold as steel and twice as flinty, but Judge Brassels nods in agreement to the whole thing. “Carry on,” he encourages, and Bucky steps right back into his argument.

It’s a lovely, sunny, bitterly cold Wednesday morning, the kind where your toes feel like icicles in your shoes and you seriously consider moving to Egypt just for the weather. Wade’d stood in the foyer of his apartment building for fifteen minutes before heading out to the courthouse, glaring at his car and willing the heater to work. Predictably, it’d only blown dust and cold air, and he’d ducked down to the cafeteria for crappy coffee just to warm himself up. The coffee’s cold now—hey, no way in hell he’d ever drink it—but he can at least feel his fingers.

Feel them drum against his thigh, maybe.

His day’s packed with a number of hearings: this one with Robbie Aguilar, moody “street artist;” a sentencing hearing for a mid-level drug dealer in front of Judge Nguyen; a review something-something for his one juvenile case over with Judge Smithe; and then, lunch with Darcy. Okay, well, lunch and hearings are two different things, but he’d definitely added it to the shared office calendar like it counted as official legal aid business.

Emma’d raised her eyebrows at him once it’d populated on their work servers Tuesday afternoon. “Is this a thing I’m going to have to worry about?” she’d asked.

Wade’d looked up from the file he’d been notating. “What?”

She’d waved her phone at him. “Lunch with this girl. Do I need to worry?”

He’d rolled his eyes. “Do you worry about Bobby’s relationship with Hank?”

“Only always,” she’d replied, and then disappeared down the hallway.

Hey, he never claimed his boss was sane.

His boss’d sent him three different e-mails that morning, too, reminding him of stupid things like the looming pile of defense referrals (yeah, he knows), next week’s extra-long staff meeting (yeah, he definitely knows), and the fact that he really needs to work on matching his socks in the morning (and, uh, sure, he knows about that, too). He tugs his pants down a little as he wiggles around in his chair at counsel table, though, just in case.

Bucky’s still talking. He’s really good at the argument part of motions hearings, don’t misunderstand, but he spends a _lot_ of energy rehashing every little detail. He already writes the world’s most pristine paper motions. He can’t be good at _everything_.

Wade liked him better back when he worked for that defense firm.

Eventually, though, he finishes up his argument and wanders back to the prosecution’s table, and that means it’s Wade’s turn. He rises slowly, gathers up his notes, and wanders up to the podium. He pulled out his best suit for this, one that’s black and actually matches, and his tie features exactly zero comic book characters. Hey, motions hearings are serious business, especially when opposing counsel always looks like he stepped right out of GQ.

Seriously, Bucky. Slick back your hair, you could be a movie star.

Wade straightens his legal pad and clears his throat.

“Mister Aguilar gets that the bar for stopping him to search is pretty low,” he begins, shrugging a little. He hates standing in front of the podium like a first-year law student practicing oral arguments for class, so he steps to the side and lets his elbow rest against the wood. Judge Brassels is cool with that. Really, Judge Brassels only cares about deviations from the norm when they’re especially obnoxious. “Reasonable suspicion, I mean, what’s that? You need to be able to articulate it, right? ‘Something more than a hunch,’ I think the case law says. If a trained officer can come up with a basic reason for being suspicious, hey, we’re in.” He leans his weight against the podium and only stops when it creaks. Maybe everything in this courtroom creaks. “Mr. Aguilar, he gets this. And he recognizes, I think, that the events kind of came together in the most incriminating way possible: dark night, street-art alley, duffel bag, hoodie sweatshirt. You know?”

When Wade glances over at his client, the guy’s scowling. Huh. Pretty critical for a guy who’s wearing one of his lawyer’s spare no-iron shirts. Wade tries to flash him a smile, to soothe the savage beast or whatever, but Robbie’s frown only deepens. 

The nervy smile actually worked better, Wade thinks.

“But today, Officer Li testified about his suspicions, and what’d he say? He said— Hang on, I wrote it down.” He reaches over and picks up his legal pad. His own handwriting’s kind of a mess, but he can skim through it pretty quick. “Right, here we go. He said that Mr. Aguilar was hanging out near an alley known for street-art, that he wore dark clothes, and that he carried a duffel bag that ‘sort of clinked.’ And that’s it.” Judge Brassels’s head bobs slightly as Wade glances back up, and he takes it for a pretty good sign. “He admitted that he didn’t think there were any weapons involved, that he’s never felt threatened in that area, none of that. He just thought that my client, with the dark clothes and the bag, he looked ‘shady.’ And that smells like a hunch, not reasonable suspicion.”

He grabs his pad, smiles politely at the judge, and heads back over to the table. As soon as his ass hits the chair, Robbie’s up in his face. His breath smells like something’s died in the back of his throat. Wade really needs to invest in an emergency mint supply for his work bag. 

“You practically called me a criminal!” Robbie complains. He hisses through every syllable. Wade wonders if someone’s popped his lungs or something. “Dark night, dark clothes, what were you trying to do?”

“Imply that you looked guilty, but not guilty _enough_ ,” Wade replies under his breath. “Now, _shhh_.”

For about three seconds, he thinks Robbie might slug him.

Eh, wouldn’t be the first time.

Robbie beats feet out of the courtroom the second Judge Brassels leaves, either pissed off at the fact that the judge wants another few days to consider the motion or at the whole “implied you might, in fact, be a criminal” thing. Yeah, like the guy’s _eight_ unexpunged juvenile vandalism convictions hasn’t tipped the court off already. Either way, he tugs off the shirt, abandons it in the middle of the aisle, and storms out like a petulant twelve-year-old.

Wade _so_ prefers the hardened criminals over stupid entitled assholes like Robbie Aguilar.

Once his file’s away in his bag and he’s shaking the shirt out, Bucky sidles up to him and claps him on the shoulder. “I’ll talk to the restaurant owner again,” he says. “See if we can’t agree to cut out the jail time and stick to restitution and probation.”

Wade stops folding up his shirt long enough to shake his head. “Pretty sure he won’t agree to it.”

“Pretty sure he’ll play like shit in front of a jury,” Bucky retorts, and since Wade can’t deny it, he just kind of laughs.

They emerge out into the busy hallway together, bumping arms a little as they slide around the gaggle of people waiting their turn for Judge Brassels’s courtroom. The third Wednesday of the month is child support day, filling the judicial complex with nervous-looking men who suck at keeping their kids in diapers. One’s arguing with a tearful girl—no, seriously, she’s a _girl_ , nineteen or twenty at the oldest—while her baby sleeps in the car seat at her feet.

Wade sometimes dislikes people.

“By the way,” Bucky comments once they’re clear of the crowd (if not the yelling), “rumor has it—” 

“Great song,” Wade interrupts. Bucky stops for a second and frowns, probably because there’s not yet a Kidz Bop version of Adele’s album. “Sorry,” he says, and waves the joke away.

Bucky waits an extra beat, anyway. “I heard you and Darcy are a thing now.”

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Wade asks. He stops outside of Judge Nguyen’s courtroom and cranes his neck to peek through the tiny, chicken-wire-reinforced window. Inside, the judge’s on the bench and Maria Hill stands at the podium, gesturing seriously. Her hand motions are sharp and no-nonsense, like she’s trying to karate-chop the air. Yeah, Wade’s totally looking forward to this damn sentencing hearing, if _that_ is the Maria Hill waiting for him. When he glances back at Bucky, the guy’s frowning at him. “Maybe electric-type?” he continues, and Bucky’s frown darkens. “Ghost-type? If you’re one of those fire-type assholes, I swear—”

“Are you guys _not_?” Bucky cuts in, instead of picking up on the joke. Wade thinks maybe he’s a little clueless about the whole Pokémon thing. Someone should educate his kid. Maybe the token gay uncles’d get in on that. “I just heard through the grapevine that you and Darcy’d started dating, and I wanted to—”

“What? Tell me off?” 

Bucky grinds his sentence to an immediate halt, his mouth snapping shut like somebody’s pulled his verbal emergency brake, and Wade sighs. He rubs the side of his neck and buys himself a little time. “Look,” he says after a couple seconds. He feels like the best plan might to get this whole proviso tattooed on his chest or something. Or maybe he could buy a series of _I’m not a douchebag who’s planning to crush Darcy Lewis’s hopes and dreams_ t-shirts. “I get that the general over-under on me fucking this up is super high, and that I can’t be trusted with Darcy’s delicate heart or whatever, but we’re adults. If we want try this out, then it’s ours to try out—or, I guess, to fuck up.” He worries all of a sudden he might scratch all the skin off his neck, so he drops his hand to his side. “Like adults do. At least, I guess. I mean, I didn’t have an arranged marriage like you did with the actual Mister Rogers or anything, so I— Uh.”

And yeah, he’ll admit it: he would’ve kept right on trucking, run right through the rest of the speech he’d practiced in front of the mirror after Clint’s initial bitchery, if not for Bucky’s face.

Bucky’s contorting, twisting, almost-laughing face.

“Are you actually—” he starts to ask, but before the words all come together, the guy in front of him loses it and actually starts to guffaw. That’s right. Guffaw. Look it up in the dictionary, because it necessarily implies a big, hearty belly laugh. Volstagg style, if you’ve met the guy, with the file clutched too hard to his heaving chest and everything. 

He quakes with it, even. _Quakes_ , folks.

Wade stares.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky attempts once he recovers a little, but the barks of laughter tumble into chortles and he’s swept away on the fresh tide. Wade suspects mental illness. One too many _My Little Pony_ marathons, you know? First sign’s always dreams about becoming Rainbow Dash, second sign must be uncontrollable laughter in the middle of the hallway.

After what seriously feels like two-point-eight-five lifetimes, Bucky straightens up and smoothes a hand over the lapels of his blazer. “Sorry,” he wheezes again. In all fairness, he does sound at least a tiny bit sorry. “I just can’t believe you assumed I’d be against you going out with Darcy.”

“Do we really need to talk about Darcy’s autonomy as a twenty-first century woman? Because I— Wait, okay, what?”

Because Wade’s practiced the whole feminism argument, too—he outlined it on the back of a Burger King receipt in his car Saturday morning, just in case Clint’d stuck with his weird Darcy-centric paternalism after their run that day—but now, it skids to a violent stop. Assuming, Wade reminds himself, turns you into an ass. Especially when you don’t even listen to what’s being said.

Across from him, Bucky raises two dark eyebrows. Wade dubs it the _were you planning on back-talking?_ look. Probably mastered it on the four-year-old before discovering its workplace applications. 

“So,” Wade finally says, because something needs to break the now-awkward silence between them. Especially since, in this corner of the hallway, they are really the only human beings in sight. “You don’t think this is a crazy disaster in the making?”

“Why would I?” Bucky retorts. Wade considers hugging him. None of that half-hearted _no homo_ bullshit, either, but a proper, full-body lunge of a hug. Instead, he lets the other guy shake his head. “I wanted to suggest it to her when I realized the potential! Steve’s got this weird non-interference policy when it comes to other people’s relationships, though, and I like sleeping in my own bed.” He adjusts his grip on his file before shrugging. “I mean, you’re ridiculous and unbalanced, sure—”

For what feels like the first time since the conversation started, Wade smiles as he nods. “Thanks,” he replies.

Bucky falters after that, like he might not’ve expected Wade to just accept the compliment. “But,” he adds after another couple seconds, “Darcy’s about the same. You sort of suit one another.”

Wade admits it: his grin grows into this stupid, shiny, prideful thing. Wait. Prideful’s like boasting. Just proud, then. A stupid, shiny, proud thing. “Thanks,” he repeats. Since randomly hugging people is generally discouraged, he reaches out and claps Bucky on the upper arm. It is one solid arm. “Really.”

Nguyen’s courtroom starts to empty out right then, filling the hall with law enforcement officers and random unwashed future felons. Hey, these people all have upcoming court dates, Wade’s allowed to say that. He’s also allowed to step away from Bucky and check whether Heimdall’s done at the defense table.

He’s peering through the herd of strangers when Bucky sidles back up to him. “Did someone try to discourage you from going out with her?” he asks. He’s dangerously close to invading Wade’s personal space. “With Darcy, I mean.”

It’s almost conversational, but not all the way. No, mostly it’s nosiness wrapped in the worst conversational poker face Wade’s ever seen.

But Wade’s a good friend, so he answers, “No.”

After that, the rest of his Wednesday is literally awesome.

 

==

 

“Oh my god, I am going to kill her,” Darcy says, and throws her bag down in the booth before collapsing in after it.

The bar around the corner from the law school is almost always super busy, and Friday nights are no exception. In fact, Friday nights are probably the worst of all possible nights, because domestic pints are only two bucks and the queso bowls are bottomless after eight. It’s eight-thirty right now, the latest date Wade’s ever been on, and he’s on his third bowl of queso.

Shut up, at least this most recent refill cost him nothing, okay?

He’s also halfway through planning out his cross-examination for an upcoming evidentiary hearing against Clint, his hair standing up on end from him running fingers through it and scratching his scalp while trying to decipher impossible-to-read law enforcement affidavits. He tries to pat it down as Darcy waves the waitress over, but it’s sort of hopeless.

It’s even worse when Darcy grins at him, reaches across the table, and fluffs it all up again.

Part of the allure of working in a bar by the law school—at least, if you want to call it allure, your choice—is the atmosphere. Wade sort of thrives in the chaos, the noise and music rising up around him and then crashing down on him like white-capped sea waves. He cuts through the distractions like a hot knife through soft butter, and everything in front of him shines clearer for it.

Plus, sometimes the criminal law professors commandeer a back booth and loudly discuss Constitutional issues. Wade will firmly deny owning a notepad that’s solemnly dedicated to those discussions. It’ll be a lie, but he’ll do it.

Anyway, he loves this bar, loves the conversations and the clamor and the Black Eyed Peas CD that’s perpetually on repeat. Which is why, when Darcy’d texted him an hour ago asking him to meet her there at eight-thirty for drinks, he’d texted back _already here ill keep a seat warm_.

A seat, and also maybe his face, because Darcy leans across the table to snag his discarded menu without first consulting the neckline of her shirt. She nearly spills right out of the thing, all this soft white perfection practically heaving in front of him, and Wade swallows.

Hard. He swallows hard, he means. Not— Uh. The state of his slacks is absolutely unrelated to Darcy and her top.

“Earth to Wade,” she says, and waves her hand in front of his face. He blinks and jerks back a couple inches, but he only really succeeds in slamming his knee into the support under the table. He swears under his breath and leans down to clutch what will probably be one gnarly bruise, and Darcy rolls her eyes. “Get him one of those beers that comes with an orange on the glass—”

“I’m not a _complete_ girl,” he argues.

“—an order of your sweet potato fries, and that big basket of fish and chips with extra malt vinegar.” 

The waitress flashes them a blindingly fake grin and saunters off, a lot of hip-sway added into the equation, and Darcy reaches to steal a couple chips out of the basket. She’s still more-or-less on display, what with her chest pressing lightly against the tabletop and everything, and Wade wonders whether it’s intentional.

Her top’s green, by the way, with lacy scalloping around the neckline. Yes, Wade just noticed that two seconds ago.

“Who died and made you queen of the menu?” he finally asks, once he remembers that staring is rude in pretty much every culture, but especially theirs. Darcy quirks an eyebrow as she helps herself to a huge glob of queso. “Or is this a test of my worthiness, seeing if I’ll let you order for me?”

“I order for you at trivia all the time,” she points out. The statement’s punctuated with a little jab of the chip. Before she pops it between those criminally pouty lips, that is.

“Because you know what’s good there.”

“I know what’s good at every dive bar in the county. It’s practically a required course first year.”

Wade narrows his eyes. He hopes it looks appropriately skeptical and intimidating. “And if I don’t want to share your fish and chips?”

The ends of Darcy’s ponytail bounces onto her shoulder when she cocks her head at him. He thinks for a split-second that she looks like a curious puppy, but then, puppies never look as simultaneously attractive and terrifying as Darcy Lewis. “Who the hell said the fish and chips are for sharing?” she demands, and only cracks a smile when Wade caves first.

The waitress shows up just then, armed with waters and two extra-large beer glasses, the kind that a toddler could probably drown in if given the opportunity. By the time she’s laid straws next to waters, Darcy’s chugging her drink like a freshman at a frat party.

She only breaks off for air. The waitress glances at Wade, eyebrows raised, and he shakes his head. He’s no stranger to the _your significant other is maybe crazy_ look. Usually, he’s the crazy one, is all.

He’s squeezing orange juice into his beer when he finally thinks to ask, “Hey, who’re we killing, anyway?” Apparently, though, it’s kind of the wrong question to ask, because Darcy groans and immediately folds herself onto the table face-first. Her head disappears against her arms, and she lays there for a second before she starts shaking her head. They’re emphatic, meaningful shakes, too, shakes that cause her ponytail to flop all over the place. Wade reaches forward and catches it in his hand to keep her dark hair from flying into the little bowl of molten cheese.

Her curls are ridiculously soft. Baby-soft, even.

He really tries to ignore that.

“It’s Jane,” she laments once the head-shaking’s all finished, but her elbow muffles most of the sigh that follows. She forces herself to sit up, her clacky bead bracelets clicking against one another the whole way, and reaches again for her beer. “I’m supposed to have my paper proposal for my privacy law class done by the end of business on Monday,” she explains, shaking her head, “but instead of working on research tonight, guess what I did.”

He drops the orange into his beer. Darcy, meanwhile, gulps down another greedy inch of hers. “Not study?” he guesses.

“I,” she answers, setting down the glass with a thud, “spent three hours making crafty-ass baby shower invites. With rubber stamps and shit.” She shakes her head again. “Three hours. Instead of research.”

“You could research my privates, if you’re pressed for time,” Wade suggests. He only breaks into a grin after she’s glowered at him for a couple seconds.

She retaliates by flicking condensation off her glass at him, then steals his tiny appetizer plate. She loads it up with tortilla chips before continuing. “I want to do this baby shower thing right, really,” she stresses as she confiscates the bowl of queso, “but she makes it so frustrating. She’s a brainy science goddess perfectionist trying to impress the future in-laws with her sophisticated life or whatever. And me, I’m just—”

For about half a second, he thinks she’ll find the right word and throw it out into the air between them, but she ends up just heaving a sigh. She waves the sentence off with spaghetti fingers and sparkly nail polish, choosing instead to coat one of her stolen chips in queso. A couple loose tendrils of dark hair’ve fallen out of her ponytail after the whole face-hiding incident, framing her face like something out of a painting— _The Birth of Venus_ , maybe, or some sexy hipster _Mona Lisa_. 

He wants to reach over and tuck them back behind her ear, but he knows it’s way too intimate for a second proper date. Technically, a first proper date, since dinner at the Thai place only half-counted. 

He toys with his glass, instead, and watches her worry her pouty lips together.

“She keeps sending me pinterest links with ideas for games and snacks and baby-themed decorations,” Darcy continues. She pauses in her pursuit of delicious chips-and-cheese snacks to push her glasses up and rub the bridge of her nose. “And I really want to be like, ‘Jane, you are literally the only person who cares about these things, everyone else wants to drink mimosas and pretend you’re not losing your mind,’ but that is _not_ a best friend move.”

“Not really,” Wade agrees. He watches her down another couple mouthfuls of beer. God, women who can drink are sexy as hell.

She sets her glass back down and shakes her head again. “I want to be supportive and hand-make everything the way god apparently intended, too, but with work and school, I’m busy. You know?” Another chip lands in the queso. “I’m not sure I can squeeze handmade party favors with scalloped lace ribbons into the rest of the shit I’m supposed to accomplish. I mean, she’s just doing research, she doesn’t get that—”

“I can help.”

“—some of us are up to our eyeballs and can’t— Wait, what?”

Darcy is literally always pretty—seriously, trust him on this, he’ll someday complete a longitudinal study about how curvy girls are sexy even when they take tooth-brushing selfies in a dirty bathroom mirror—but Wade secretly thinks she’s the prettiest when someone surprises her. He’d discovered it the first time a random-ass guess at trivia ended up earning them bonus points, and now kind of wants to soak himself in it. Because when her eyebrows pop up and her dark eyes widen, never mind when those pouty lips part and her long lashes flutter, she looks like a magazine model. 

Not a dirty magazine. A normal one. _Cosmopolitan_ or something. 

Instead of telling her that—because let’s face it, she’d assume a dirty magazine, too, and he’d rather not offend her on _every_ date from now until forever—he gestures in between them with his own glass. “You need somebody to glue place cards and cut out pictures of baby buggies, right?” he asks, and then refuses to wait until she nods. “I’m good with scissors and I stopped eating paste back in the fifth grade. I can help.”

For a second, Wade suspects she might laugh, all sparkly-eyed and warm, but then the waitress returns with their food. She sets it all down in front of them, the sweet potato fries, the fish and chips, a fresh bowl of queso, and then, last, Darcy’s second beer. Either she’s telepathic or Wade missed her ordering it, but either way, she salutes the waitress as she retreats. 

She’s messing with the arrangement in front of them, moving all the tiny plates, massive baskets, and empty queso bowls around, when Wade blurts, “Awesome, by the way.” The non sequitur just sort of pops out between them, uninvited, and Darcy freezes as she reaches for the giant tabletop ketchup bottle. All the soggy steak-fry “chips” in her fish basket are already piled on one of the little plates, a sure sign she’s about to pass them over to Wade, but he knows the random interruption lost her.

And keeps losing her, too, because she stares at him. He wets his lips. “You started to say you were ‘just’ something, right?” he reminds her, and he watches as her head bobs. “The word you wanted is ‘awesome.’”

She snorts. “Okay, sure,” she scoffs, and slides him the ketchup.

“Why aren’t you?”

“Why _am_ I?” she retorts immediately. She drops two giant chunks of breaded cod on top of the chip pile and shoves it all across the table. “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” she presses as she snags her pile of sweet potato fries. “This isn’t my crisis of confidence or something, but what’s really going right for me right now?” When he’s finished drowning his chips in ketchup, she snags the bottle. “I’ve got another four semesters of law school—and that’s if I take an afternoon class this summer, which Fury’ll love—before I’m out on the street and begging someone for a real lawyer job. I’m constantly swamped at work, Tony’s bitching at me all the time because Pepper covers for me and god forbid he _share_ , and my best friend has seriously lost her mind in favor of her six-month parasite.” 

She shakes her head while she caps up the ketchup, and then swigs her beer like it might be the last pint of IPA on Earth. Wade shouldn’t find that sexy, but he _so_ does. 

“I get that life’s supposed to suck around now,” she finally says, and punctuates it all with a sigh. “I just hate that it _does_.”

“Tell me about it,” he agrees pretty much immediately and around a mouthful of potato goodness. He knows from the way her head snaps up that he’s chimed in too fast, though, so he spares a second for her to pick at her fish. “I work with this guy Bobby, right?” he prompts, and Darcy nods along. “We’re pretty much the exact same age. But he’s married and shopping around adoption agencies with his hot doctor husband, and look at me.” The song changes to that one about tonight being a good, good night. Wade hates that song, but he raises his glass anyway. “I’m in a crappy college dive bar on a Friday night.”

She grins at him. “With a _girl_.”

He flashes a grin right back, wide and a little wild. He feels wild, like he should listen to will.i.am and live it up. Maybe later, he’ll go out and smash it like oh my god (whatever that particular line’s supposed to mean). “With a girl who’s not gonna have my redheaded babies,” he adds, and toasts the air.

“Hey, I could totally have your babies,” Darcy returns. She drags a couple fries through the pool of malt vinegar at the bottom of her fish basket. Her grin, though, drops to a moody scowl. “God, what is it with people and babies, anyway?” she demands. “I mean, okay, Thor’s probably got a fantastic disco stick—”

Wade nods. “No arguments here.”

“—but it’s a baby, you know? It’s splitting cells and all that other bullshit we all learned in high school biology.” She splits a fish stick in half and soaks it in the vinegar, too. “And since Thorling Prime’s obviously an accident—”

“I’m pretty sure Jane knew what she was getting into when she hopped on pop,” he notes, and Darcy’s face twists into this half-disgusted thing as she grabs her beer. He raises his hands. “Just saying,” he defends, because _really_.

She shakes her head. “My point is,” she stresses, “she doesn’t have to act like no one else in the history of humanity besides she and Thor ever knocked themselves up. I mean, two of my brothers were accidents, and no one offered my parents a medal for it.”

He watches her gulp down a couple more swallows of beer and chase it with a couple more chunks of fish before he leans back in the booth. The pile of soft chips drenched in ketchup and leftover queso challenge him to a taste adventure, but his eyes linger on Darcy: the swing of her ponytail, the way her sparkly fingernails glimmer in the light, the way she hums to the music under her breath.

“It ever bother you?” he asks, and her head lifts. Since she’s chewing, he shrugs and adds, “The way people our age keep just darting out in front of us in the successful-life race, I mean.”

Her jaw stops moving for a few seconds. After she swallows, she presses her lips together into a tight line. “I don’t know,” she admits. She picks at an extra-crusty bit of fish. “I mean, I love Jane, okay? I’d pretty much do anything for her. If this makes her happy, she should be happy.” The chunk of breading pops off and tumbles onto the tabletop. She frowns at it, then flicks it to the floor in a way that some might consider vindictive. “But I think it’s crazy that we’re all supposed to embrace some invisible biological clock right about now. What are we supposed to do, start jumping on the nearest person for weddings?”

“What about jumping him just for fun and maybe profit?” Wade suggests. He promises he’s screwing around, just joking with her, but the way she glances at him is all sparkly-eyed and sexy. His throat dries out for a second, especially when her thumb traces this slow, sultry path down the side of her glass.

“I’m here with you, aren’t I?” she replies, and he wonders whether heat in her smile could burn down the building in addition to boiling his blood.

They make out a little in the cold January night, leaning lazily against Darcy’s sensible sedan—“Hand-me-down from my parents,” she’d complained when Wade’d asked, right before she pressed him against the side of it and kissed him—and letting their mouths explore. The kisses linger, hot and a tiny bit sloppy, with steamy breaths framing their faces like halos. He holds onto her waist as her fingernails drag down the arms of his coat, clawing a little and leading to really indecent thoughts about those nails on bare skin, and he tries really hard not to groan.

Tries, and fails. 

She tastes like hops and vinegar, smells like vanilla and sugar, and feels somehow both solid and fragile in his hands. When she grips the back of his neck, he’s forced to pull away and gasp for breath, because her fingers against those wispy little hairs there feel _too_ good.

The bass beat from inside the bar echoes into the dark night. Wade feels like his heart’s pounding in time with the music, stuttering and irregular. He leans his forehead against the top of her head.

Her fingernails scratch through his hair, rough enough to send a shiver through him. When he presses his lips against her hairline, she releases a sound that’s close enough to a whimper that it almost kills him.

“I’m going to go now,” he half-pants, his breath caught against the line of soft, dark hair and soft, pale skin. He feels her tip her face against his neck and fights off the urge to close his eyes. “Two beers is pretty much the gateway drug to bad decisions in the backseat of your Toyota.”

“Nissan.” Her lips tickle against his pulse point.

“Whatever.” He forces his head up, away from all that warmth, and ends up just surveying her face. Her features are all half-shadowed in the crappy parking lot lights, but it somehow only highlights the details: the cut of her cheekbones, the length of her lashes, the fullness of her kiss-swollen lips. He’d barely glimpsed her face before she’d dragged him down by the lapels of his coat and seized his mouth, but now, he can appreciate how genuinely gorgeous she is.

And how open and almost-bare her expression manages to be.

He wonders whether they’re capable of just, you know, moderately-unwise decisions, instead of _bad_ ones.

“I should go,” he says again, because the longer her looks at her, the less he can think straight. 

“Yeah,” she agrees, maturely, but then reels him in to kiss him again. Close-mouthed this time, not greedy and eager like when she’d backed him into her car, and he slides his hand around to her back. Everything about Darcy’s brash and loud ninety percent of the time, but when she presses the curve of her body against his, she feels like she might bend and break.

He can’t remember the last time he actually kissed someone and meant it; stopping feels like willfully throwing himself down a flight of stairs. He peels himself away slowly, steering her backwards until he can duck out of her grip. When he steps away, she shoves her hands in her coat pockets for a second and just sort of stands at arm’s length.

Maybe he’s the one at arm’s length. Really, it’s hard to tell.

“Goodnight,” he says, his whole body—face, chest, belly, _lower_ —feeling warm, flushed, and entirely too full.

“Goodnight,” she replies, and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, she’s smiling. 

 

==

 

“I’ve got a project for you,” Emma says as she strides into Wade’s office on Monday morning—and then, without permission, pulls the door shut behind her.

Wade honestly can’t remember the first time he met Emma Frost—all the interviews, career fairs, and other begging-pleading-groveling sessions that lead to his eventual employment really blur together at this point—but he’s absolutely certain that he’s always found her terrifying. She’s like a jungle cat, sleek, sophisticated, and predatory as hell. The first time he watched her handle a motions hearing, he’d peed a little.

Granted, he’d drank a massive energy drink that same morning, but still. Definitely peed a little.

Today, she’s dressed in a form-fitting white suit with just the hint of a wide-collared silver-gray shirt on underneath. Her shoes look like they were stolen off a really high-class hooker, her hair is perfectly straight, and Wade sort of wants to throw up his breakfast of coffee and a doughnut all over his desk. Not because of how she looks, but because of how she holds herself.

You know how lionesses are the actual big-cat badasses? Okay, maybe you don’t know that, so just FYI: lionesses are the actual big-cat badasses, the ones who kill all the antelope and keep the men-lions under their non-opposable thumbs. The men-lions are basically just kept for sex and their impressive hair, because the ladies rule the roost.

That’s how Emma stalks across Wade’s office and deposits herself in a chair: proud and fearless.

See? You’d pee yourself a little, too.

Instead, though, Wade rubs his face. He knows he’s sporting a day’s worth of stubble, a clear side-effect of staying up until after two a.m. playing Words With Friends with, uh, a friend. A female friend. A girl friend, and please note the space between the two words.

Unless Darcy’s okay with removing the space.

He should ask about that.

Point is, he’s tired and stubbly and not at all fit for court, which means it’s probably a good thing he’s not expected in court until tomorrow. 

Across from him, Emma quirks an eyebrow.

“Sorry, sorry,” he apologizes quickly, because he thinks she might eat him praying-mantis style if he keeps his mouth shut. He reaches for and then promptly downs the last couple mouthfuls of his coffee. “It’s before noon on a Monday, you’re lucky I remembered my pants. Unless pants are optional, in which case, you’re lucky I chose to wear pants.”

The perfectly-plucked eyebrow of doom never wavers. “Did you have a late night?” 

“Early to bed and early to rise,” he retorts, and Emma allows her second eyebrow to join the first. He’s not totally sure how a woman with the most perfectly-practiced wooden non-face manages to convey so much in a tiny brow-wrinkle, but she’s fucking fantastic at it. He sets down his environmentally-unfriendly Styrofoam cup and shakes his head. “Couldn’t sleep,” he half-lies, because his personal life is none of her business.

She leans back in the chair and crosses her legs. “Girlfriend?” 

“Girl-space-friend, and no.” She blinks at him. “Sort of,” he amends. At least it earns him a nod of momentary approval. “Anyway, did you say project, or did I hallucinate that thanks to my non-sleep and my girl-space-friend?”

“Oh, I said it,” she replies, and proceeds to open up the folder she carried in with her. Fun fact: Emma Frost is the queen of the mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation and the duchess of indecipherable Excel charts. Wade considers faking a caffeine-induced heart attack when she sets a packet of papers on his desk, but instead, it’s just—

“Are these _pro se_ forms?” he asks. 

She nods as he starts to flip through them. “We’ve nearly recovered from last month’s server—debacle,” she says. The half-second pause isn’t hesitation as much as it is a silent _do not force me to remind you that someone hacked into our website and managed to change all our downloadable documents to porn_ warning. Wade glances up at her—message received, and all that—and lets her lean back in her seat. “The ‘content’ has been handled,” she continues, “and the actual webpage and most of its associated data was restored last week. The only thing left to do is to rebuild the interactive forms, test them, proof-read them, and ensure they’re up and running.” She waits one perfectly-timed beat before adding, “The sooner, the better.”

Wade tries to stand on his grin, but Emma’s patented disappointed-face proves that really he’s only succeeded in contorting his face into a Heath-Ledger-as-the-Joker sort of hot mess. “Because Bobby’s going to kill someone if he gets another call about what goes in the ‘name’ blank on a divorce petition?”

He’s not sure, but he thinks maybe the little twitch at the corner of Emma’s mouth is actually an attempt at a smile. “He threatened to quit and become a house husband.”

“Again?”

“Twice more.” He snickers a little, but her face shifts into something stony. “Repairing the servers and repopulating the website already drained a massive part of our budget,” she says, folding her hands in her lap. “We can’t afford to outsource this right now, but if we don’t get the forms back up—”

“Bobby’ll lose his mind?”

“—we might lose some of the grant money we received for our access to justice services.” When he buttons his lip—because seriously, what defense can you launch when you’ve just joked about losing the money that keeps half your office in a job?—Emma catches and holds his eyes. Everything about her is once again lioness-intense and icy-cold serious: her jaw is chiseled from diamond, her hands are tightly gripped in her lap, her shoulders are square and still. “I need you to help with the proofing and testing.”

It is absolutely not an offer, request, or anything else that Wade could conceivably turn down. Well, at least not if he wants to continue his employment, and he’d rather not think too hard about the alternative. He nods. “Okay,” he answers. “But, uh, you know that my experience with programming and coding is limited to the blog I had in high school, right? I mean, I can bold and italicize with the best of them, but if you want like fancy repopulating shit or whatever used to be in those forms, you’ll need to outsource at least some of it.”

The problem with Emma’s featureless non-face, he decides right then, is that he can’t actually read it. Because she sits there, absolutely silent, and just stares at him with unblinking, unmoving, impossible eyes. Like the blue steel, but only if the steel in question was honed into a point and ready to slice him open from neck to navel.

He really hates that she can do that.

“You do know that Nate’s undergraduate degree is in computer programming, right?” she asks after a few too-long seconds. 

“I—” he starts, but then he stops. No, he wants to answer, a knee-jerk that nearly brings him off his desk chair. No, he did not know that. In fact, he isn’t even sure Nate Summers is a human being sometimes. He doesn’t know Nate’s middle name or his birthday or whether he likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. How in the world would he know what Nate studied in undergrad?

And how could he ask when, ever since he called Darcy an “improbably attractive woman,” Nate’s avoided him like he’s a carrier of the plague?

Emma quirks her eyebrow again—Wade hates that eyebrow—and he forces a little smile. “I didn’t know,” he answers, because Emma can sniff out dishonesty like some weird drug dog. “I had no idea that was a thing. That he did, I mean, I know computer programming’s a thing.”

She watches him for a few more seconds, all stone features and carnivorous big-cat consideration. Wade only remembers to breathe after she nods. “I’ll need the forms up within the month,” she says as she rises from her seat in a smooth snap motion. Wade tries to mimic it and walk her out like a proper grown-up, but he almost trips over his own desk chair. She cocks her head slightly in his direction.

Trying to read him, probably.

She tries to read people like case law: analytically, carefully, and with a lot of unnecessary criticism. Well, maybe not always that last part.

“It may require some late nights or work on the weekends, especially if the forms require a lot of debugging,” she continues. She pauses at the door and looks over her shoulder. “I hope your girlfriend won’t mind.”

“Girl-space-friend,” he corrects. Her eyes narrow in an expression Wade fondly refers to as the _you are not bullshitting anyone, least of all me_ special. He reaches up and scratches the side of his neck. “She works in the field,” he says after another couple seconds. “She’ll understand.”

Emma nods. “I’ll have to meet her, sometime.”

Yeah, Wade thinks, like he’ll ever let that happen.

“I’ll make sure that happens,” he promises, and waits until she’s left to bang his head lightly against the wall—and groan.

 

==

 

“Hank and I have a proposal for you,” Bobby says at lunch on Tuesday.

“I don’t do threesomes,” Wade replies around a mouthful of taco, and Bobby throws his balled-up straw wrapper at him.

The judicial complex cafeteria is almost always crowded, and Tuesday’s no exception. Bobby’s covering a half-dozen mental health commitment hearings—not necessarily because they leave him feeling all warm and fuzzy about the universe, but because it’s one of the thousand little side-jobs that keep Bobby occupied. Plus, he’s pretty good at convincing mentally ill people to stay in the hospital instead of heading for the hills, and everyone appreciates that.

Except maybe the over-worked, under-paid people at the hospital. Huh. Wade never really thought about them.

Wade, on the other hand, spend his morning in and out of Judge English’s courtroom, dancing between hearings with Clint (who was friendly and open and displaying all the signs of a man very recently laid by his boyfriend) and Natasha (who was angry and frustrated and displaying all the signs of a woman who wanted to light everyone she knew on fire). He’s due for one plea hearing after lunch.

And after the seven tacos on his plate are systematically destroyed.

What? He likes tacos a lot.

“I’m serious,” Bobby informs him. He’s opted for the sandpapery breaded chicken with the scary-looking mashed potatoes. One of these days, he’ll realize that nine-tenths of the cafeteria food down here is not actually food, but rather industrial waste. In the meantime, Wade sucks beef-flavored taco juice off his own thumb. “Listen, the other night, we were talking about how we don’t really have any couple friends besides Scott and Jean—”

“Probably because your sickening wholesomeness scares other people away.”

“—and how they’re almost always busy now that the non-profit Jean works for is expanding.” He reaches for his soda. “Most of the doctors in his program are young and single, I really don’t know anyone outside of our office—”

“Because of your sickening wholesomeness,” Wade offers again, just to make sure Bobby heard him the first time. 

He’s rewarded with an eye-roll, which, while not spectacular by any definition of the word, is still better than general disinterest and annoyance. He’ll take what he can get.

“My point,” Bobby stresses, gesturing a little with his paper cup, “is that we decided that we need more coupled-up friends. And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. I have a newly-coupled-up friend.’”

Wade’s literally a half-second from finishing up on taco numero dos, but he pauses to stare across the table. Bobby’s wearing that smug, self-pleased expression, the one where he’s clearly celebrating some sort of near-imaginary victory. Wade immediately distrusts that expression. He’d even stretch as far as to say he’s _suspicious_ of that expression.

Shut up, they aren’t total synonyms, okay?

“Is Carol dating again?” he asks, because Bobby’s smugness causes this weird spike of nervous energy to run up his spine in the time-honored tradition of electrical shocks. “I thought we banned Carol from dating. I made the _How I Met Your Mother_ intervention sign and everything, I don’t see—”

“Not Carol,” Bobby answers.

“Emma can’t socialize because she’s a vampire and needs to return to her coffin at night to—”

At least this time, instead of his usual easy calm, Bobby snorts and shakes his head. “Not _Emma_ ,” he scoffs. 

“Good,” Wade replies, and pops that last bite of taco in his mouth. He sits there for a second, chewing, and lets Bobby stare him down. Actually, it’s not a stare as much as it’s just a curious, lazy, casual kind of glance, the one where you expect there’s another line of conversation on its way. Wade knows that the next line should be about Nate—probably one about android girlfriends programmed both to criticize and to love—but he’s not sure he’s ready for the joke.

There are three e-mails waiting for him on his phone, all of them about starting that project for Emma.

There’s no good reason to feel twitchy about it, but the nerves scurry through his veins like anxiety cockroaches anyway.

He reaches for his napkin, still not breaking the silence, when something slides through his hair and scrapes across his scalp. He squeaks and jumps, nailing his knee on the underside of the table and making black bean juice slosh off the edge of his plate.

Which is stupid, because as soon as he twists around in his chair, Darcy bursts out laughing.

Everything under her sweater dress—tight and knit and worn with killer brown boots, thank you—bounces as she throws her head back, and beside her, Jane Foster chuckles right along. Sometime in the last three or four weeks (the exact amount of time Wade’s fallen behind on the Jane Foster pregnancy tumblr), she’s blossomed from _cute little rounded belly_ pregnant to _oh shit, there will be a baby here in March_ pregnant, and her shirt only magnifies how much baby-Thor she’s packing under there. Baby-Thor and other curves, actually, because Wade’s always sort of compared Jane to the Great Plains, but now she’s more the softly-rounded caps of the Appalachian Mountains, and—

“You liked it last time I scratched through your hair,” Darcy says, completely and totally interrupting his clumsy train of thought. Her fingernails are Crayola green, and she flashes them before running her fingers through his hair again. He knows he’ll look a mess when she’s done, but dammit, now that he knows the source, it feels incredibly good. He wants to turn to mush under her touch.

Well, ninety percent of him does. The rest carries the opposite reaction.

“You should warn a guy before you assault him,” he retorts, and resists the urge to press his face against her dress. It looks soft. He bets it would feel softer against his cheek. Or his chin. Or his—

“She wasn’t entirely sure it was you,” Jane comments. “I tried to discourage her.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “I know what Wade looks like, thank you.”

“Across a crowded cafeteria in the middle of lunch rush?”

“I think once you make out with a guy in a parking lot, you’re, like, biologically hard-wired to spot him from at least fifty paces,” she retorts, and that’s when Bobby chokes on his mashed potatoes.

Wade never even knew you could choke on soupy instant potatoes drowned in equally-soupy instant gravy, actually, but Bobby’s apparently prepared to awe and impress the audience. He holds up a hand, reaches for his soda, and chugs a couple desperate mouthfuls. Wade, on the other hand, rolls his eyes. “You’re _married_. Making out is practically a prerequisite. I don’t see how you turn into a blushing virgin bride every time anyone mentions any of the run-up to rubbing one out, never _mind_ —”

“I was not turning into a blushing virgin bride!” Bobby interruption, but his whole face is cherry red. Though, then again, that could be from the coughing. It’s hard to tell. Either way, he recovers enough to eye Darcy up and down.

Then down and back up again.

Wade’s almost positive Bobby is _gay_ —like, true, blue, never-touched-a-woman _gay_ -gay, Clint Barton level g-a-y—but he definitely starts to wonder as Bobby’s eyes track the place where Darcy’s necklace sort of disappears into her cleavage.

Wade clears his throat. Loudly. “Ladies,” he says, and Bobby jerks his head up like he’s just been burned, “this is Bobby Drake-hyphen-McCoy—”

Bobby sighs. “For the thousandth time, there’s no hyphen.”

“—my coworker and sometimes, occasionally, _maybe_ friend.” Bobby, like the sometimes-occasionally-maybe friend he is, rolls his eyes. “Bobby, these are two of the, like, dozen ladies of the D.A.’s office.”

“We’re making a calendar,” Darcy teases. Her fingers are still in Wade’s hair, but Wade only really notices when they scratch down the back of his head and scrape against his neck. He’s never considered whether he’s into nails before, but he thinks he might be. At least a little. 

Before Bobby can look _too_ curious about the joke, however, Jane shakes her head. “We’re not,” she promises, and then leans across the table to hold out a hand. Wade wonders for a second whether the belly’ll overbalance her. “I’m Jane Foster.”

“And I’m Darcy, but I’m like _completely_ sure you’ve heard about me already.” When Darcy leans over to mimic Jane’s polite-and-limp-wristed handshake, it’s with her hand still on the back of Wade’s neck. He catches her by the hip—just in case, you know, because if she slips or something, she could snap his head right off, and _then_ where would they be?—and lets his fingers sort of spread there. Her dress really is soft. Her hip, too, actually, but not in a bad way. 

“Oh, I have,” Bobby replies. It sounds innocent enough, the sort of thing you say to the girl your coworker’s spending his evenings with, but there’s a little twist at the end of the words. Wade opens his mouth to protest, to suggest Jane try the salad with pecans, to change the subject to the weather, _anything_ , but Darcy leans against him when she straightens up and Wade knows right away that he’s doomed.

Because Bobby’s fucking follow-up comment goes like this: “I was just telling Wade that my husband and I would like to invite you two for dinner Saturday night. If you’re game, of course.”

Wade hates Bobby. He hates him so much that he actually mouths the words _I hate you_ across the table. 

“I think we have plans to work on baby shower things Saturday night,” Jane says with a smile. It’s a placid, easy-going smile. Wade likes that smile. Actually, he thinks he likes Jane, who—despite being almost-married and pregnant and all those other signs that she is a more well-rounded and mature human being than anyone else at the table (yes, Bobby, including you)—never seems to lose her well-regulated cool.

At least, until Darcy says, “We’ll do the baby shower stuff in the afternoon, I’d love to have to dinner with you guys.”

Because then, Jane’s face falls into a scowl. Not even a slightly-disappointed, I-thought-we-had-plans scowl, but a world-burning scowl. A hell-hath-no-fury scowl, and Wade thinks there might be yelling in Darcy’s immediate future. A lot of yelling, with maybe some cursing on the side.

Later, though, and not right this second.

Because right this second, Bobby and Darcy are laughing about dinner plans and everything seems to be absolutely fine.

The girls leave a couple minutes later, Jane with a tight goodbye and Darcy with fingernails through Wade’s hair (driving him to distraction, thank you). Bobby resumes his lunch, pleased as punched with himself and fucking _humming_ a little ditty.

Wade glares at him. “I hate you,” he says, aloud this time. 

Bobby shrugs, but he also smiles. It’s a slow-burn, lazy thing, smug and self-satisfied, and Wade really hates him. “This’ll be fun,” he decides, but he sounds like the cat who ate the canary. Of course he does. Wade’s always suspected that the sickening wholesomeness is just an act.

“You better be careful,” he warns as he reaches for another taco, “or I’ll tell your hubby that you’re secretly evil.”

“What makes you think he doesn’t already know?” Bobby retorts, and returns to his leathery chicken and dangerous mashed potatoes.

(Wade secretly hopes he’ll choke again. Not to death, mind you, just to discomfort.

But, of course, he doesn’t.)

 

==

 

 **d.lewis:** _and then it turned into this lecture about loyalty. like it’s inherently disloyal to want to spend time with someone other than her. i’ve never once bitched about her date nights or whatever, so why can’t i grab dinner with you and your friends?_

 **waaaaaaaaade:** _cuz like dr dre said, bitches aint shit?_

 **d.lewis:** _LOL!_

Here is the official list of shit Wade’s supposed to finish before he crashes into bed Tuesday night:

1\. Prep for the plea negotiation with Clint in the morning  
2\. Review the forms he and Nate’ll be updating for the next month.  
3\. Clear out any bullshit referrals that’ve come into legal aid’s official e-mail box in the last three days.  
4\. Maybe ( _maybe_ ) return Nate’s messages about Emma’s project.

And, just in case you’re appropriately nosy or whatever, here’s the official list of shit Wade managed to accomplish before 10 p.m. on the aforementioned Tuesday night:

1\. . . . 

He leans his head back against the top of his couch and stares up at the ceiling instead of, you know, attempting to finish any of the items on his to-do list. Gmail informs him that Darcy’s typing another message, and he knows he should probably wait for it with bated breath, but he’s tired. Tired for absolutely no reason, too, since all his Tuesday hearings went swimmingly and he’s actually not mad at Bobby for the stealth-mode double-date invitation anymore.

Well.

He’s maybe still a _little_ mad. 

But he’d stayed three hours late at the office to start reviewing documents for an upcoming trial (against Natasha, of all people, which by definition requires ten times the prep of a normal trial) and finishing up a sentencing motion he’ll have to argue against Phil. By the time he’d kicked off his shoes and stripped down to boxers and a t-shirt, he’d felt like someone’d snuck in, siphoned off all his spare energy, and then ran off to sell it on the black energy market. 

Or something like that, at any rate.

There’s a half-finished pizza still in its box at the other end of the couch, and he’s got both his work e-mail and the official legal aid e-mail boxes open on his work laptop, but he’s studying the ceiling instead. It’s a network of chipped paint and cracks, proof he really needs to consider a slightly nicer apartment complex, and he stares at them until they start to form patterns. A rabbit, a certain male body part, the profile of Commander Spock, the smooth curve of Darcy’s—

Okay, no, wrong place to take that.

He imagines that it’s crisp line of Nate’s metal-hard shoulders, instead.

Yeah, that doesn’t help at all.

He’s imagining the whole thing to be a bas-relief portrait of Bea Arthur’s face when his phone buzzes, nearly rattling its way off the end table. He straightens up quick enough that he almost drops the laptop onto the floor. The latest message from Darcy’s actually a _brb_ , so he’s pretty sure the message isn’t from her.

Probably Bobby. Or Clint. Or— No, no, those three are really the only people who text him on even a semi-regular basis.

Which is why he considers throwing his phone in the oven and then salting its charred remains when the display reads: _New message: Nathan ________ Summers_.

He gapes at it for a long time, completely convinced that it’ll explode if he unlocks the screen. All those childhood warnings about blowing his fingers off with fireworks led right up to this moment, and he needs his fingers for work. He can’t pound the podium with his fist if he’s unable to _make_ a fist, you know? A stump just wouldn’t do the trick.

On the other hand, well, he’s a mature adult, you know?

He can at least read a text message. Even if he flinches when he types in his password and seriously considers kicking the thing across the room, just to be on the safe side.

Luckily—or maybe unluckily—nothing terrifying happens. Instead, unlocking the screen and opening up the text window only reveals one horribly mundane message.

_I thought we could at least devise a plan for this project later this week. Friday?_

There’s no emotion in it, just like there’s usually no emotion in Nate; like the man himself, the message is calm, professional, and impeccably put together. It reads like any one of Nate’s e-mails, or post-it notes, or a transcript of one of his hearings: even and smooth as softened butter. There’s absolutely no reason for Wade to clutch his phone like he’s seen a ghost, or to re-read those sixteen words sixteen different times.

Except he’s not really talked with Nate for a week, which is new.

Except Nate’s voluntarily text messaged another human being, which is new.

Except he feels suddenly out of his depth, which isn’t actually new at all.

 _tell me 1 thing first_ , he texts back after entirely too much time passes. Gmail’s blinking at him, displaying a truly epic-length Darcy rant that’s waiting for his attention, but he’s staring at his phone, instead.

Nate replies literal seconds later. _What’s that?_

_is it nathan kingslayer dragonborn summers?_

Maybe it’s the exhaustion talking, but Wade really likes thinking that the delay in response is because Nate’s laughing at him. _Guess 239: incorrect_ , he replies.

And again, maybe the exhaustion talking, but Wade smiles. _friday it is_.


	5. Double, Double, Toil, and Mediocre Salmon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade eats dinner. Oh, wait, you wanted more than that? Okay, then: Wade eats multiple dinners. One is with Nate. One is with Darcy, Bobby, and Hank. Neither is particularly horrible. Well, for the most part.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> VAWA is shorthand for the [Violence Against Women Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Against_Women_Act). Relevant to Nate's life, it includes special immigration rules for battered women. 
> 
> A motion for downward departure is a motion that asks the court to look at a criminal defendant’s circumstances and consider a more lenient sentence. Sometimes, the sentence is just shorter; other times, it is a different type of sentence (such as rehabilitation or probation instead of prison).
> 
> I may have co-opted a line from something perpetfic wrote. It is a fic that none of you are allowed to know about yet. Shhh.
> 
> Thanks as always to my beta-space-readers, saranoh and Jen, who are both rocks in this time of trial known as "18 days until the bar exam."

“You didn’t mention she was eighty,” Clint hisses between tightly-clenched teeth.

“In my defense, you never asked,” Wade retorts, and shrugs as he reaches for his coffee.

The steady clacking sound of knitting needles catching fills the conference room, and Clint glares at Wade across the table. Wade’s client is in fact seventy-nine years old, the grandmother of six and great-grandmother of one, and is in the process of knitting a full-blown sweater for her daughter Mabel, who is sixty-one years of age. Wade knows these things because Milly’s told him. In excruciating, never-ending detail.

Milly loves her family.

She also loves reaching scary-high speeds in her towncar, which is why they’re in the district attorney’s conference room in the first place. 

Wade sips his crappy break room coffee as Clint studies Milly like she’s a high school science experiment. Her old-lady glasses—you know, the huge kind that sit on the very end of her nose and hang from her neck with a beaded string when she’s not wearing them—turn her watery eyes all comically-huge. Not that she notices, because again: knitting.

Well, okay. Not that she notices at _first_. Because the longer they’re both quiet, Wade with his coffee and Clint with his staring, the more her needle-clacking slows down. Finally, she finishes a row and sets the whole kit and caboodle in her lap. “I can hear you wondering, young man,” she says, and she peers over the edge of her glasses at Clint. “You might as well ask. Better to ask than to stare, at any rate.”

Clint swallows hard enough that Wade can hear him across the table. “I’m not, uh, meaning to stare,” he replies after a couple seconds. He sounds nervous. Wade wonders how many genuinely old people he hangs out with, Fury maybe excluded. “I just— From the police reports, I thought you’d be a little more . . . spry.”

The word totally sounds like a curse, something you save to mutter under your breath at a particularly horrible thanksgiving, but Milly chuckles. “I assure you, I am plenty ‘spry.’” Her fingers twitch in her lap, but she leaves out the full-blown air-quotes. “I have to keep up with my great-grandbaby somehow. He’s two now, you know.”

“That’s great,” Clint says. The discomfort radiates off him. Wade half-expects the little cartoon squiggle-waves to pop up around him. “But about your charge—”

“Last week, I took little Canton—that’s his name, you know, Canton, named after a city in Ohio if you can believe it—out to the park. We were stuck on the bus for a full twenty-five minutes, and all because of this driver’s license business.” She shakes her head and then, slowly, removes her glasses. When she folds them, they hang neatly against her flowered blouse. Wade’s pretty sure his couch pattern was designed by the same people in the same decade, and his couch came from Goodwill. “I know I shouldn’t’ve sped, Mister Barton, but I also know that I can’t spend the next year of that little boy’s life dragging him on public transport because of one tiny mistake.”

Clint shifts slightly in his seat, probably without realizing the delicious alliteration that comes along with it, and tugs a little on his tie. He looks nervy, like he’s staring down his boyfriend’s mother instead of some stranger off the street. Or, if you’re the technical sort, some stranger off the interstate who zipped through a construction zone (speed limit fifty) while doing eighty-five. And with her hazards on for no conceivable reason, but that’s beside the point.

Wade sips his coffee. He wishes now he’d stolen some of the hazelnut creamer that Dr. Banner keeps trying to hide in the back of the fridge. Hint to the good doctor: if your hubby labels it with a giant pink post-it note reading _PROPERTY OF BRUCE AND SOMETIMES TONY IF HE’S IN THE MOOD_ , it’s actually easier to spot. Instead of, you know, harder.

(Insert a joke about married sex here, please.)

“Miss Courtier—”

“Milly.”

“Milly.” The word sounds clumsy, tripping across Clint’s tongue. “I understand that a license suspension’s hard on people. I do. And with a kid Crieghton’s—”

“Canton, dear.”

“—Canton’s age, I can see wanting to avoid the bus and everything.” Wade thinks Clint maybe wants to crawl under the table and promptly die. “But you have a history of moving violations and drove twenty-five over. I can’t ignore that.”

“Oh, I’d never ask you to _ignore_ that, Mister Barton.” Milly leans forward, but her elbows never touch the tabletop. They just don’t teach manners the way they used to, these days. “I came today prepared to write that big giant check the nice officers asked me to write. But Mister Wilson here said you were a reasonable man—”

“Did he?” Clint asks. There’s suspicion pinned in the back of his throat. Wade, like a mature legal colleague, rolls his eyes and waits until Milly’s definitely not looking to stick his tongue out. “I consider myself reasonable,” he tags on as a caveat, “but some attorneys might disagree.”

Whether he can tell that Wade’s cough is actually the word _Sif_ , Wade isn’t sure.

“Well, he did assure me that very thing,” Milly informs them both in her best _former schoolteacher_ tone. Wade shoves his hands under his thighs, he’s so afraid of having his knuckles rapped with a ruler. “And I know that, given my behavior a few months ago, you might find what I’m asking to be incredibly _un_ reasonable. But there is a little boy who wants nothing more than his great-granny to take him to the park, and I can’t very well do that if I’m not allowed to drive my big, slow old car.”

“Slow?” Clint repeats.

Milly shrugs. “My grandson Michael drives a GT Mustang. He let me try it out, once, and I got it up to a hundred-ten—”

“Decibels!” Wade interjects immediately. He thinks maybe it’s too late—Clint’s eyebrows’ve crawled up to his hairline—but hey, it’s certainly worth a try. Milly frowns at him. “Car has a sweet subwoofer. I’ve seen it, it’s pretty loud.”

Milly’s face is already a sea of wrinkles, thanks mostly to age (sorry, Milly), but her confused scowling only exacerbates the problem. “You haven’t seen—”

“A subwoofer that awesome before? Nope, haven’t.” And when he flashes her a grin, he hopes to hell she can read the eye twitch that clearly means _please stop confessing to other traffic crimes while in the same room as the assistant district attorney in charge of traffic crimes_.

They’re all three quiet for a few more seconds, Clint’s attention flickering between the little harmless old lady and her fearless attorney (yes, he’s fearless, stop laughing). Finally, though, he sighs. “You’ll need to pay the fine in full,” he says. Wade’s pretty sure the tightness to his tone only touches upon his exasperation.

Milly nods. “Absolutely, Mister Barton.”

“And,” he presses, “no more moving violations. Because if I see another ticket with your name on it, I don’t care if you were driving Cantor—”

“Canton,” Wade corrects.

“—to the hospital for emergency surgery, I will move to revoke your license.” His whole face turns deathly serious. Wade almost counts it as a sexy face. Almost. “Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Milly answers, and clutches her hands together like she just might mean it.

The receptionist lady buzzes Wade back into the office after he’s hugged Milly goodbye—not his idea, by the way, especially since he now smells mothballs on his own damn skin—and he swings by the break room for coffee, hazelnut creamer, and a chunk of coffee cake before he heads back toward Clint’s desk. He stops to hip-bump Jane’s chair lightly (she swats at him, but she also smiles) and to wink at Bucky as he half-argues about a case with Steve. By the time he’s wandered the full loop, Darcy’s out of her desk chair and leaning her elbows against the top of her cubicle partition. Today, her shirt’s all purple paisley and there’s leggings under her short skirt. 

Wade really wants to study her thighs.

“Did Clint _really_ not know she was eighty?” she asks as a greeting, her fingers stretching out toward his coffee. He backs up a step. “Her birthday’s on her file. How’d he miss that? Temporary sex-related blindness?”

“Never talk about his creepy Coulson-centered sex life around me ever again,” Wade returns. He shudders as theatrically as possible and is rewarded with one of Darcy’s big, warm laughs. “And how should I know? I’m not your boss’s keeper.”

“Speaking of which, her _boss_ is right here.” Clint finally looks up from the file he’s reviewing and frowns at the both of them. “Three feet away at most.”

“And incapable of reading a year of birth,” Darcy returns. Wade grins at her, and he sort of loves the way her grin’s accompanied with the offer of a truly-epic high-five.

Clint must love it less, because he huffs and rolls his eyes. “If your entire dating life devolves into an episode of ‘Let’s Torture Clint Barton,’ I’m quitting.” He tosses the file in his grip into Darcy’s desktop inbox and then points a finger directly at Wade. “And _you_. Letting the Monopoly man’s widow railroad me was _not_ okay. I felt like I’d be screwing over somebody’s grandma.”

“Technically, six people’s grandma _and_ somebody’s great-grandma,” Wade informs him. His already-mean default expression turns instantly murderous, so Wade responds like a reasoned adult and raises both hands in defense. While stepping backward. And maybe standing closer to Darcy, whose newly blood-red fingernails might serve as a violence-deterrent. “I told her she could honestly explain the situation to you and see what you said,” he explains as Clint attempts to kill him by sheer force of will. “Because you are reasonable. And you don’t want somebody’s grandma—”

“Six somebodies’ grandma,” Darcy notes.

“—rotting away in her house ‘cause she maybe sped a little.”

“Do you always define ‘little’ as ‘twenty-five over?’” Darcy wonders.

He grins at her. “You should see what I define as little, baby, it’ll always bowl you—”

“Okay, see, yeah, we’re not doing this.” Clint even holds up his hands, like that might stop the rising tide of innuendo. “I have to work with you. _Both_ of you,” he presses, and Wade snaps his own mouth shut. “The last thing I need is to be thinking of anybody’s ‘little’ _anything_ while I’m in open court.”

“You think about me in open court?” Wade asks. Darcy hides her face in the crook of her elbow to muffle her giggle. When he waggles his eyebrows at Clint, though, not even her elbow really helps with volume control. “Badass pen new guy, I _never_ knew that first utensil exchange would end in—”

“I’m walking away now,” Clint decides, and he whirls on his heel and struts off like he means it. Probably for the best, too, since that’s exactly when Darcy abandons all semblance of self-control and burst into ridiculous, loud, raucous laughter.

It reddens her cheeks better than any makeup and leaves her half-wheezing, her whole body propped up on the wall of her cubicle for maximum support. “Oh my god,” she pants, shaking her head. Wisps of hair escape her ponytail and fall into her face. “It’s like he forgets that he and Phil go at it in his office all the time.”

Wade nearly snorts his coffee. “Define ‘all the time.’”

“Uh, more often than anyone should ever need to know about, end of story.” She tucks some of the hair behind her ear, almost distracted-like, but Wade’s pretty good at tracking people’s eyes. Specifically, he’s pretty good at tracking _her_ eyes, and the way they sweep back and forth down the hallway before she leans over, wraps her fingers around his tie, and drags him toward her. He squeaks a little when his chest impacts the cubicle wall, but, well, at least there’s a wall between them.

A wall that’s shorter than Darcy, though, so not a _real_ wall.

“I won’t see you before Saturday if you skip out on trivia, you know,” she comments. Her fingers smooth over the knot at his throat, but her fingernail grazes his skin a few times. He kind of loves her nails. Like, he’s an open-minded guy and everything, but he’s slowly becoming convinced that if he can’t be man-handled or lightly scratched, he’ll never be happy. “I feel kind of cheated.”

“All the more reason for me to start up that Emma Frost complaint hotline,” he jokes, and Darcy rewards him with a laugh. A low one, though, throaty, and he’s forced to swallow. He feels conspicuous, somehow, pinned against the side of her cubicle with her fingers near the soft part of his throat.

If life was a _Criminal Minds_ episode, Penelope Garcia’d spend the next morning talking about his dismembered body, or whatever.

He wets his lips. “We’ve got a month on this stupid project,” he says, but he’s more aware of how close Darcy’s dark lashes and pouty mouth are than he is his own deadlines. “Proof-reading, form-testing, super-boring bullshit stuff that’ll eat up a couple nights a week until it’s done. And then, you know, trivia forever.”

“Just trivia?” she asks. 

“And anything I can make trivia an innuendo for, sure, but that’s a pretty shallow pool. I mean, I’m pretty sure _pick my category_ sounds more creepy-dirty than good-dirty, and—”

“Darcy?” 

The red-fingernailed death-grip on Wade’s tie immediately releases, and when he twists around, he can clearly see why. Because standing in the middle of the hallway, arms laden down with files and face creased into a very serious, very tight frown, is Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers, literal Boy Scout and all-around goodie-two-shoes, and Wade—

Wade buttons his jacket before he steps away from the cubicle wall, let’s just put it that way.

“Criminal history time already?” Darcy asks, and holds out her hands like a little kid would, complete with wide-open palms and grabby fingers. Steve rolls his lips together and surveys her for a moment. Wade suspects he’s checking for a hair out of place, or maybe smeared lipstick. He feels suddenly like a grade-A, professionally-trained creeping creeper. 

“I think most of them are college kids who got really into last night’s basketball game and decided to drive after,” Steve finally says, once he’s apparently convinced that Darcy’s honor remains intact. “But in case we have some repeats—”

“I know the routine, boss,” Darcy replies. She lifts the stack of files right out of Steve’s grip, deposits them on her desk, and then plants a hand on the top of them. When she leans over, her blouse gaps, and Wade forgets how to breathe for a second. “I’ll text you tomorrow and let you know how trivia went,” she informs him. It sounds simultaneously like a dismissal and a promise.

He nods. “Right,” he says, and lets himself out.

That afternoon, he receives an e-mail from Darcy with no subject line, but when he opens it, he nearly hurts himself laughing.

_steve lectured me for ten minutes on propriety in office, how is this my life?!_

_guess its the price u pay gettin involved w me sweetcheeks_ , Wade types back, and he’s not surprised when receives a picture of Grumpy Cat as a reply, either.

 

==

 

“I’m fairly sure Emma’s not paying you to play Angry Birds while I work,” Nate comments, and reaches for another chicken nugget. 

It’s weirdly amazing how, after an entire week of almost radio silence and stony, unaffected cold, Nate transforms back into a normal human being. An actual human, too, no android traits about him. Instead, he’s all full of reason and decency as his big fingers fly across his computer keyboard. Wade’d spent a lot of the first half-hour of actual work—after the hour of planning and the ten games of paper, rock, scissors to determine who’d drive out to pick up their dinner from McDonalds—watching those fingers morph into fleshy blurs against the black keys, clattering seamlessly through coding that Wade’d need three additional degrees just to understand, never mind _produce_.

Nate’s competence wafts around them, an unexpected elephant in the room.

And Wade can’t kill the sixth pig on this level, goddammit. 

He swears a little before tossing his phone onto the chair next to him, but all Nate does is smile. He mostly-hides it behind his computer monitors, of course, but Wade knows those eye-crinkles like he knows the back of his own hand. The two of them are settled in Nate’s office, surrounded by Nate’s plush furniture, tasteful wall art, and high-tech dual-screen computer set-up perfect for writing complicated immigration appeals. Wade feels a little like the poor kid at the uptown party, what with his clunky old work laptop and everything.

“Program faster and I’ll proof more,” he challenges the man behind the twin fifteen-inch Dell curtains. He even punctuates it by stealing a chicken nugget of his own.

“Proof the originals,” Nate returns.

“The originals were downloaded directly off the state supreme court’s website.”

Nate raises both his eyebrows. On Emma, the expression’s mean-spirited and critical; on him, it’s curious. Either way, his fingers never stop moving. “So they’re automatically infallible?”

“So I’m not fixing their typos if I already have to work overtime,” Wade retorts, and Nate barks a sudden rocket of a laugh. The sound fills the room, then dies quickly away, and Wade tries to focus on something other than cell phone games in the rising silence. He checks his work e-mail, then his personal e-mail, and then three webcomics and a blog run by a Perez Hilton wanna-be, all while Nate types away. It’s soothing, somehow, white noise against the creeping Friday darkness outside—and the creeping interference of Wade’s own thoughts.

He almost says that, too, but then Nate asks, “How’d the motion go?”

Wade freezes, his arm halfway extended to snag some of the now-cold fries sitting amongst the mountain of chicken nuggets they’d liberated from their oppressive, over-stuffed cardboard box. “Motion?”

“For downward departure.” Nate finally glances up from the task at hand long enough for eye contact. Wade can’t help but think that the others—well, at least Bobby and Carol, Emma sort of keeps to herself in her fortress of solitude downstairs—would do the whole narrow-eyed peering thing until he cracked, but Nate mostly looks interested. And neutral, he secretly adds. Like an actual colleague, not a busybody in colleague’s clothing. 

“You mentioned it at the staff meeting Monday,” he continues once Wade’s said absolutely nothing. His broad man-mountain shoulders even lift in an easy little shrug. “He committed the battery because his friend handed him a laced joint, right? You’re proposing rehab?”

“Right,” Wade answers. “I, uh, didn’t realize you were listening.”

Nate’s fingers still. “You didn’t,” he says, and it’s definitely not a question.

“No.” Without the soothing white noise of clacking, clattering keys, though, Wade feels kind of twitchy. Nervous, in a way, like the walls might start slowing closing in on them the way the trash compactor almost smushed Luke, Leia, and Han during the first _Star Wars_ movie. “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he says after a couple seconds, just to fill the space, “I know you’re like preternaturally observant and everything, that’s sort of your secret talent. And I know you’re Emma’s second-in-command, not that she’d ever own to it. But I also know—”

“Wade.”

“—you’ve been working on that crazy VAWA appeal and helping out that defense team out of Warren County on that immigration side-issue in their big conspiracy case, never mind the fact that you write the longest motions on the planet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if—”

“ _Wade_.”

Nate’s voice rumbles through the room, far-distant thunder or the rolling approach of a helicopter overhead. When he snaps his mouth shut and looks away from his fries, Nate’s sitting up perfectly straight, his whole face out from behind the computer monitors. Wade watches as he surveys the scene in front of him—the mess of fast food, the mostly-empty soda cups, the computers and forms and scribbled-on post-it notes—but never quite raises his head the whole way. Some emotion that Wade can’t read flickers on and off Nate’s face for a few seconds, a cheap strobe light of feelings before his jaw hardens.

“I’ve been busy, but not deaf,” he finally says, but the way it catches in his throat makes Wade suspect it’s not what he planned on saying at all. “I couldn’t miss you bitching about that motion.”

The corner of his mouth tips up into a little smirk, and Wade decides to pretend like he’s missed out on the weird throat-catch and rolls his eyes. “Just because Coulson once killed a man in Vegas just to watch him bleed—”

“Reno, and to watch him die,” Nate corrects, and pulls his chair back up to his desk.

“—doesn’t mean that I’m _bitching_. I’m more creatively releasing my pent-up steam and frustration so I can channel only raw, unfettered _awesome_ into my actual motion.”

Nate snorts. “That’s your story?”

“And I’m sticking to it like the syrupy residue that stays in a glass after you drink a lot of fruit juice.” He flops all the way back in his seat and stares at the ceiling, content to listen to Nate’s furious typing. Well, mostly-content. Maybe half-content. A sort of weird bubble area of content between actual contentment and a cheap, knock-off version of the stuff, the kind—

“Bobby’s husband works the weekend shift starting next Friday,” Nate says, and Wade twists around so he can both rest his head on the back of the chair and see a sliver of Nate’s face around the edge of the monitors. Nate’s lips are pursed into a tight line, his eyes absolutely focused on the task at hand, but there’s something stony about the way he holds his body. Like he’s more tin than man, a robot again instead of a human. 

Wade’s not sure he understands this weirdo, but he isn’t dissuaded from replying, “Yeah?”

“As I understand it, yes.” Nate’s fingers slow but never stop. “I thought, if you’re not otherwise indisposed, we could all at least have dinner. I think he gets lonely when he’s left home alone.”

“Don’t they have pets for that?” The question must ping somewhere on whatever internal scale of deservedness Nate relies on, because his eyes flick over for a half-second. “Something smart and fuzzy. Like a ferret. Ferrets are kind of cute. Maybe we can get him a ferret, then he won’t need to climb all over us every time Hank’s—”

“That’s a ‘no,’ I take it?” And Wade swears to the deity of your choice that there’s a little hint of disappointment caught up in those six insignificant words.

He swallows.

Nate keeps typing.

“It’s not a no,” he says, because he’s morally or contractually obligated to say _something_ at least mildly intelligent. “It’s definitely the opposite of no. I just, you know, need to know when we’re going, for my calendaring and stuff, it’s not—”

He swears there’s more to his sentence. The goal’s to hit “funny and insightful,” mostly, to talk intelligently about how hard it is to balance work, various friends, and now a friend who he kisses on a somewhat regular basis, but he’s robbed of the opportunity when his cell phone chimes. Chimes and buzzes, actually, like a bee caught inside of the upholstery of Nate’s other chair, and he swears a little as he cranes to grab it. Nate, on the other hand, just rolls his eyes and keeps working.

His competence is like a freight train. In a complimentary way, of course.

He unlocks the screen without checking who the message is from, and then smiles.

 **Darcy:** _i’m bringing you coffee before i head out to trivia, what do you want?_

Instead of answering, he raises his head. “You want coffee?” he asks immediately, without really thinking.

Nate’s speedy fingers freeze against the keyboard. When he shifts in his chair, it’s just far enough to tip away from the monitor and sweep his too-calm eyes over Wade’s face. “I’m not going to get you coffee when we have some downstairs,” he warns.

Wade rolls his eyes. “Not you, Mister Work Ethic,” he returns, and he thinks he catches the corner of Nate’s mouth nudging up into a smile. Not-a-no crisis adverted, then. “My buddy Darcy’s gonna bring me something, I wanted to know if you needed a caffeine booster shot.”

“Your buddy?” Nate repeats. It rumbles in his chest. Wade thinks that, actually, he might make a pretty convincing police interrogator, what with the low voice and the willfully-blank face. “I didn’t realize you called the people you date your buddies.”

He shrugs. “Have to be regular-buddies before you can be bed-buddies,” he answers. “At least, I do, on account of the horrendous cancer-related deformity—”

“You’re missing a testicle, not riddled with tumors,” Nate replies with a tiny snort.

“—and the way strangers can’t really handle my uncontained awesome.” The guy falls silent again, typing instead of actually answering the question, so Wade flicks a crusty little half-fry over in his direction. “Coffee?”

“Tell your bed-buddy thank you, but no,” Nate replies, “and then download the first form off Dropbox.”

Wade rolls his eyes. “Aye-aye, captain,” he returns, and sends his order off to Darcy before starting the epic battle of man versus machine known as _logging into Dropbox on his ancient, stupid computer_.

He wants to assume, of course, that all the weirdness and uncertainty, the radio silence and the cold shoulder, the stony unfriendliness and whatever other walls he’d built between himself and Nate without even trying— Well, he wants to figure that it’s gone, eroded by time and stupid comments about Phil Coulson and dinners with Bobby. They even discuss possible venues for their Bobby Drake support group meal while Wade walks through the form, checking that all the boxes populate properly and scribbling down notes about when they don’t. But there are no more twitchy half-smiles, no more eye crinkles or little teases, and Wade instantly assumes he’s screwed something up.

“Was it the cancer joke?” he asks Darcy down by the building’s back door, their shadows long and lean under the glow of the stupid security light. Steam from his triple-shot mocha curls into the cold January air. He’d skipped his coat as he wandered out the fire doors, and after two minutes in the cold, he’s starting to regret that decision. “You think maybe I need to be more sensitive about that shit?”

She shrugs. “He sounds like he might just be a dick,” she offers. She’s all bundled up in a pea coat and thick scarf, and her fuzzy-topped boots make her look more like a teenage tumblr hipster than an actual adult human. The skinny jeans help, of course. Regardless of how cute she looks, though, Wade frowns at her. “What?” she asks, holding up her fingerless-gloved hands. “As long as I’ve known you, you’ve described them all the same way: Emma’s terrifying, Carol’s crazy, Bobby’s like a Boy Scout version of Clint, and Nate’s—”

“Quiet and moody and weird,” Wade finishes for her. Not because he wants to be the significant other who can finish sentences, but because he’s said those exact words a thousand times. And not just to Darcy, either; he’s rattled them off to Clint, to a couple folks at muy thai, and to all their friends on the Learned Hand Jobs. It’s practically a catchphrase at this point.

“See? Maybe he’s just a dick and you never saw it before.”

He drags his free hand through his hair. “Maybe,” he agrees—but he’s almost positive that it’s definitely not _that_.

By the time he’s back in the office, his whole body cold except for his pink-tinged mouth (thanks, Darcy’s lip gloss), Nate’s fixed a bunch of bugs on the form and uploaded the altered version for Wade to play around with. The silence returns, sort of overwhelming in its heaviness and almost colder than the air outside, but Wade endures.

Well, Wade endures for about twenty minutes.

“Chili’s,” he says finally, once he’s out of coffee and finishing up his official list of errors. Nate raises his head and, for once, his whole body stills. “When we take Bobby out to keep him from death by husbandless boredom, we should go to Chili’s.”

He can’t really put into words how reassured he is by the warm, lazy way Nate smiles. “And buy him a ferret,” he adds.

Or, actually, by how easily the eye crinkles return when he starts to laugh.

 

==

 

“Oh, she is as lovely as Bobby promised!” Hank gushes, and actually kisses Darcy on the hand.

Hank McCoy-hyphen-Drake (and yes, Bobby, everyone knows there is actually no hyphen) wears a fuzzy blue sweater that reminds Wade not of a man-mountain, but a man-lake. Don’t get him wrong, of course—Hank is still massively barrel-chested, with huge hands and huge bare feet that probably prove true the statement about guys with significant shoe sizes—but the dark blue reminds him of the Loch Ness more than the Alps. 

Not that Wade’s been to either, but he’s seen pictures.

His dark hair’s a little ruffled, too, painting the picture more of the mad scientist than the intrepid medical student with his eye on— God, what exactly did Hank want to be when he grew up, again?

“The eventual goal is a specialty in pediatric genetics,” he explains to Darcy, draping her coat over his arm, “but for now, I am cursed to follow directions and do as I’m told.”

Yeah, right, that. 

“Please stop flirting with my coworker’s girlfriend,” Bobby says right then, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s not a scrawny guy by any means, but compared to Hank’s breadth he looks like a string bean. Whether he’s trying to make up for it with the lumberjack-chic plaid shirt and the slouchy jeans, he can’t be sure.

Hank smiles, slow-burn and easy as can be. Wade actually really likes Hank. Deep down, of course, in that place where Bobby’s creepy empathetic niceness can’t reach. “It’s not my fault your coworker has an entirely delectable girlfriend.”

“Girl-space-friend,” Wade corrects. 

Darcy whips her head around to scowl at him. It’s actively unfriendly, the kind of frown where you wonder whether she might be able to burn the world down by force of will alone, and for a second, Wade loses all capability to reason. He shrugs, like maybe his mind might reboot with the motion, but it just morphs Darcy’s frown into something darker.

He suspects Bobby notices this wordless exchange—he’s wrestling with his constipated face again, that’s for damn sure—but Hank responds to the whole thing by lightly _tsk_ ing. He sounds like somebody’s mother until he follows it up with, “Jealousy does not become you, Robert.”

Bobby rolls his eyes. “Jealousy is not what I’m—”

“Boys,” Darcy interrupts, presumably because the lines on Bobby’s forehead are deeper than the Jakarta trench, “trust me when I say there is _plenty_ of me to go around.”

The half-second that follows is heavy and nervous, with everyone bracing themselves for the comment to come crashing down around their ankles—but then, Hank laughs. He throws his head back, his shoulders shake, and his booming voice fills the foyer and then stretches beyond it. Darcy’s dark frown disappears as she joins right in, and Bobby grins along with them. It’s a special grin, the kind reserved for when somebody you love shows is ridiculous in all the absolute best ways. It’s stupid, it’s obnoxious, and it’s sort of the purest thing Wade’s ever seen.

Which he can totally say, since his own grin falters the more Darcy’s frown haunts him, looming in the back of his brain like the worst ghost ever.

“Oh, I will _enjoy_ you,” Hank declares once he’s finished laughing. Laugh-tears clump his dark eyelashes until he wipes them away with the side of a meaty finger.

“I still don’t do threesomes,” Wade informs everyone. Just, you know, for the record and all those important things.

“ _You_ don’t have to,” Darcy returns blithely, and Bobby chokes on air when Hank starts laughing again.

The two of them—Hank and Bobby, that is, because the rest of this coming sentence won’t make sense otherwise—lead them on a sort of guided tour of the house, Hank’s big hand resting on Darcy’s back the whole while. The touch is lazy and friendly, the sort of touch Wade’s never really received from any friend _other_ than Darcy, and he ends up just shoving his own hands in his pockets as they wander through. The house, unsurprisingly, is small, cozy, and entirely _them_ , clean without being pristine and nerdy to the core. In the living room, there’s a DVD rack that exclusively houses video games, a huge assortment of smarty-pants books lined up on shelves that span the one wall, a huge overstuffed leather couch with mismatched pillows, and—Wade shits you not, here—a framed photo of space hanging on the wall. No, really, space, the final frontier or whatever, and Hank starts into a really long explanation as soon as Darcy coos about it.

Wade loses him somewhere between the words _nebula_ and _gaseous matter_. “Nerd,” he mutters, because Bobby’s looming right next to him.

“This from the guy who has a Batman poster in the living room,” Bobby retorts. He elbows Wade slightly, too, a painless jab Wade thinks is maybe meant as a reminder. As though he’d forget something as awesome as Batman.

“Less nerdy than space farts,” Wade defends, but then Hank sweeps his hand toward a doorway and leads them into the kitchen. 

The super-kitschy, super-farmy, super-country-bumpkin kitchen, with the light brown wood and the stupid patterned wallpaper and the frou-frou trim on everything. The utensil holder’s shaped like a freaking rooster, and that’s not even mentioning the horrible dishtowels that—

Something snags in Wade’s t-shirt and jerks him back _hard_ , sharp and sudden enough that he almost trips backward. Darcy dangles off Hank’s ever word as he cracks open the bottle of wine on the counter, totally unaware that her date’s being molested by—

“One word about the kitchen,” Bobby hisses, voice so low you might mistake it for parcel-tongue, “and I will murder you.”

Wade feels himself smile. Actually, no; he feels himself smirk, all smug and self-satisfied, a sure sign he’d _already_ smiled. “You mean a word about the kitchen that looks like it came right out of— Where’s Mister Right from, again?”

“Dundee, Illinois,” Bobby growls. No, really, the snake’s disappeared and now there’s a baby tiger in its place, grumbling in his mock-fierceness. “And don’t change the subject. If you mock it—”

“How could I mock a porcelain rooster?”

“—or _malign_ it—”

“Or your cow-patterned dishtowels?”

“—or make some kind of snarky Facebook post about it—”

“Are there fruit decals on the tile behind the sink? Please tell me there are fruit decals—”

Bobby yanks his shirt again, harder this time, and Wade loses himself to laughter. He wonders for a second how it must look to Hank and Darcy, both of them all sleekly sophisticated and sipping pink wine out of really long-stemmed glasses; after all, they’re still only halfway through the doorway, Bobby’s fingers wrapped up in Wade’s t-shirt and Wade cackling like an idiot.

This right here, by the way, this argument-slash-exchange-slash-whatever, this is why having friends is absolutely _awesome_.

“In response to your question,” Darcy says, and even though she’s shaking her head, a smile twists the corners of her lips, “I found him begging for food outside a dumpster and Clint said I could keep him.”

Wade sort of barks a laugh as he extracts himself from Bobby’s death-grip. “Don’t listen to her,” he warns Hank. He even wags a finger for good measure as he tracks across the kitchen. Darcy’s half-leaning against the countertop, leaving plenty of room for him to slip his fingers into the small of her back—and steal her wine glass. “Clint’d never ever _ever_ let her keep her strays. Even awesomely housetrained ones.”

“Since when have you been housetrained?” Darcy returns. She reaches for her glass, but Wade holds it over her head in retribution. He owes, like, twenty bucks to their trivia buddy Sam, because Sam’d pointed out how short Darcy was long before Wade would’ve noticed on his own. 

Darcy scowls at him and accepts a fresh glass from Hank, who’s smiling. Hank smiles a lot for a doctor, actually. Wade thinks it’s part of the whole kid-doctor routine. “The care and feeding of criminal defense lawyers, then?”

“With shock collars on weekends,” she replies, and Wade tries really, really hard not to choke on his wine.

“Okay, come on, really,” Bobby says while Wade’s still recovering from the wine that’s stuck somewhere halfway up his nose. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand as Bobby leans against the counter. He’s close enough that Hank bumps their hips lightly. “How’d you actually meet? Because when a guy walks in and declares he has a date, no run-up or anything, you kind of wonder.”

It’s probably a bad sign that Wade’s immediate and knee-jerk reaction is to blurt out, “That’s not what happened.” But words are like bells—can’t unring them or whatever—and Darcy tips her head in his direction. A little tip, nothing obvious, but its immediacy reminds him of Emma’s eyebrow quirk. Make that the immediacy, and then the silence right after, because nobody says a damn word.

Including Bobby, the king of unsolicited bullshit commentary.

Wade wets his lips. “You know, if you’re going to revise history to include things that never happened, I should at least ride into the office on a unicorn or something,” he finally says, after the quiet threatens to fry him up like an ant under a magnifying glass. Bobby, for his part, snorts and rolls his eyes. “Maybe a Pegasus. Those are the flying ones, right? Because I’d look badass on one of those, maybe with a lance that shoots ice bolts and then—”

“I caught him and my boss practically making out in the cafeteria at work,” Darcy interrupts, and Wade sort of wants to kiss her, just for that. But there’s something gripping her words, clenching around them and clipping the ends, and Wade— Wade’s not super good at labeling his own feelings, but he’s pretty sure he can classify the one currently invading his gut as guilt. Guilt at Bobby’s selective memory, guilt at all the details he’s never really run through with Darcy, guilt at the girl-space-friend _thing_ , guilt that he’s not super great at this.

He feels itchy and uncertain, ready to crawl out of his skin. Like psychological chickenpox, where he’s tempted to claw at invisible little spots until he can turn back into himself.

But Darcy’s retelling the story of the first time she met Wade, when he’d half-molested Clint in the cafeteria, and Bobby and Hank laugh as she digs her phone out of her bra (girls are _amazing_ ) to show off the pictures. Wade’d forced Clint to mug for one—and really, it said something about Clint Barton’s monumental patience that he’d allowed a complete stranger to mush their cheeks together like in a teenaged couple’s Facebook selfie—and Bobby snorts, he laughs so hard at that. “I left wedding magazines on his desk for _weeks_ ,” she says, flipping to the blurry shot of Clint finally shoving his new friend away.

Wade jerks far enough to stare at her. For a second, she’s someone entirely new and definitely not the kickass lady in the knee-high boots, skinny jeans, and sweater. “You never told me about the magazines,” he says, because what else _can_ he say to that?

Something entirely evil glimmers in her eyes. “You never asked,” she returns, and yeah, Wade’ll own to it: he grabs her by the hip and plants a kiss to the corner of her mouth right then, all while she starts laughing.

“One a defense attorney, one working for the state. ‘Two households, both alike in dignity,’” Hank muses once Darcy’s elbowed Wade back into his place by her side, his hand still planted firmly on her hip. It’s soft and smooth, and he tries really hard not to stroke her sweater with his thumb. Not because he thinks it’d be _bad_ , necessarily, but because he’s kind of afraid he won’t be able to stop. He also stares at Hank a little, who returns the look with a sigh. “In fair Suffolk County, where we lay our— _Romeo and Juliet_. Shakespeare.”

Beside him, Bobby sighs. “You’re the only one in the room who can quote Shakespeare off the top of his head, you know.”

“And the trend of befriending philistines continues,” Hank replies, but his lips twitch up in an almost-smile Wade finds almost-attractive.

Almost.

He’s still a nerdy man-mountain, and everything.

“You two went to boarding school together, right?” Darcy asks. She sets her wine glass on the counter, toying idly with the neck. “You met there?”

Hank’s next smile is even more attractive, because it’s a sneaky, slow-burn one that shows teeth. Wade recognizes that smile from the office Christmas party, because he’d flashed it every time he prepared to tease the pants off his other half. “Indeed! Although, we each attended for different reasons: I, due to my superior intellect, and Robert, due to his remarkably wayward youth.”

Wade wonders whether you can get a brain bleed from rolling your eyes as hard as Bobby immediately rolls them at his husband. “This from the guy who wanted to do a senior capstone studying the potency of weed based on storage methods.”

“That, my dear, was _science_ ,” Hank returns, gesturing idly with his glass. The flippantness sort of fades away for a second, though, and he looks momentarily nostalgic. Like maybe he’s remembering how being a stupid teenager in love felt, Wade thinks—but Wade also never got the chance to be a stupid teenager in love, so he can’t be totally sure. “But yes. Paired together first by student housing, then by choice.”

“They didn’t split you up when they found out you were roommates in the totally Biblical sense?” Darcy asks.

“They never found out,” Bobby replies, and _wow_ , if the lawyer thing fails he can be a comedian, because his timing almost causes Wade to spit wine all over the Country Crock kitchen.

No, really, he’s forced to set down his glass and sputter for a second before he finds words, which just means everyone else is staring like he’s the wounded antelope at the safari. “There is no way,” he finally manages to croak out, the wine still burning the back of his nose, “that they missed out on you two doing the horizontal tango.”

“There is every way,” Hank returns. Smugly. He returns _smugly_ , with a smile like he’s the hottest man in the room. Actually, objectively—

“Okay, no,” Wade’s mouth continues, even though his _brain_ is still trying to work out where Hank falls in the hierarchy of hot men in the kitchen. He even punctuates the whole thing with a gesture, so apparently, he means it. “I roomed next to you guys when we went up to hear Emma argue that appeal, and I heard _everything_. I think the people in the _lobby_ heard everything.” Bobby’s ears flame red, but Hank still looks sort of half-proud of himself. “Wait, take it back, I think the people at the other Marriott on the other side of _town_ heard everything, you two were so—”

“Uh,” Bobby says, which wouldn’t interrupt Wade’s rambling at all except for the fact that his face is as red as the tomato decals on the tiles above the sink. He scrubs a hand through his already-messy hair, but the blush just creeps down his lumberjack shirt. “We used to be more discreet, I guess.”

“What he means,” Hank picks up, and oh god, Bobby’s ducking his head to the floor and _hiding_ now, proof this’ll be _golden_ , “is that he lived in the rawest of terrors that, if uncovered, we would be expelled from school.” He sips his wine with an easy little shrug. “Nothing a pillow couldn’t handle.”

“Okay, ew,” Wade decides. Because, well, _ew_.

Darcy, on the other hand, grins like a Cheshire cat, with light dancing in her eyes and a shamelessness that Wade appreciates on almost every level. “So, what,” she responds, leaning back against the counter, “you just shocked everyone when you pulled a Cory and Topanga and got engaged at graduation?”

“I never said we were discreet amongst our _friends_ , Miss Lewis,” Hank replies. He matches Darcy’s grin watt-for-watt, and they even clink glasses.

Wade considers worrying about this alliance—because nobody worried enough about Italy and German becoming BFFs back in the day, and look how that turned out for most of Europe—when Bobby asks, “How’d you know all that, anyway?”

Darcy shrugs. “Wade,” she says simply.

She swigs out of her glass, too, like maybe sharing the intimate details of your coworker’s love life is totally normal, but Bobby blinks at her like he’s just seen a ghost. “ _Wade_?” he repeats. He even points a finger right at Wade. “As in _this_ Wade?”

Wade checks to make sure he’s the only Wade in the room—you never know, right?—before answering, “Uh, no.” Which, for the record, is an enormous and shameless lie, but there are these things called reputations, and—

And Darcy rolls her eyes. “Please,” she scoffs. “He talks about you—both of you, really, at least as a unit or whatever—all the time.”

Wade can hear his street cred shattering. “I do not.”

“Wade.” She says it like a mom might, disappointed and complete with a little head-cock. Maybe he won’t allow Darcy anywhere near his redheaded babies. Because the self-loathing he feels just from that tiny head-tip suffocates him instantly, and if he’d actually done something _wrong_ , then— “You told me about married Bobby and his perfect doctor husband—and those are quotes, by the way—ten minutes into our first trivia night.”

“You know that’s slander, right?” Wade retorts. He feels Bobby and Hank staring at him, complete with matching evil spousal grins that are proof positive he will never, ever live this down. He suddenly regrets that second Corona at their first trivia night, but Darcy’d kept him laughing, and her friends never thought he was weird, and he’d just _aced_ the classic TV category for their team. He also puts out his hands to defend himself, because that clearly will help. “Or maybe not slander. Maybe libel. Libel _per se_? Some other privacy tort I—”

Darcy promptly proves she’s the world’s worst girl-space-friend by reaching out and plastering a hand over his mouth. Bobby snorts a laugh at this, and Hank— Actually, Hank mostly looks like he wants to pop a big bag of popcorn, hoist himself up on the countertop, and watch the whole thing play out. Wade tries opening his mouth again, but Darcy just clamps down harder. “Here’s the deal, right?” she asks, gesturing with her wine hand. “He pretends to bitch about you two, how ‘wholesome’ you are or whatever, but actually? He’s _completely_ charmed by knowing two people who— Ew! Wade! God!”

Wade’s tongue is still dangling in the air when Darcy jerks her hand away and immediately wipes it off on his jeans—not hers, mind you, but _his_ —but he’s not entirely sure he cares. For one, Hank’s face ducks as he tries to hide his laughter, and he kind of likes the fact that, for what feels like the first time all evening, he’s actually succeeded in making someone laugh. And for two:

“She’s lying,” he finally reports. “She’s a lying liar who lies and I am absolutely _not_ charmed.”

“Why is your spit _sticky_?” Darcy complains, and starts wiping her hand on his shirt, instead.

“You and Mister Shoulders over there, you’re _not_ charming.”

Bobby, whose expression keeps rapidly fluctuating between amused and horrified, huffs a breath. “If it helps,” he says, shaking his head, “you’re not too charming yourself.”

“Mmm, Robert, I am not sure I agree with that,” Hank muses, and he flashes Wade a brief, genuine smile before the oven timer dings. 

They eat oven-baked salmon that tastes a little like oven-baked cardboard, a weird not-rice grain that reminds Wade of tiny brown ball-bearings, and really good broccoli while they talk about— Well, about pretty much everything. Darcy regales them with stories of her pregnant best friend, cataloguing Jane’s slow descent into pregnancy-brain related madness the same way she catalogues Jane’s ever-expanding waistline for the whole internet to enjoy. “It was all fun and games until she left ice cream on the table and put her cell phone in the freezer,” Darcy reports, gesturing a little with her fork. Bobby almost wheezes from laughter, and Hank keeps reaching for his wine to prevent an unfortunate choking accident. “I swear, I want to march into the university and be like, ‘Please, take the physics away from her. Just until the small human is _out_ , because otherwise, she’s going to blow up the universe instead of uncovering its secrets.’”

“It cannot possibly be that bad,” Hank says once he can breathe again.

“No, I’m under-selling it,” Darcy assures them, and the laughter starts up again. 

Once they’ve completed the “greatest hits” selection of Jane stories—“I could go on for a month,” Darcy assures them, “but they’re really all variations on a theme from here”—Bobby and Hank launch into a variety of assorted work tales, some involving Wade. Wade nearly chokes on a broccoli floret defending himself—“I didn’t _break_ into Emma’s office, I just happened to injure the locking mechanism in a way that required repair!” he swears—but Darcy keeps laughing, her hair bouncing and her whole face caught up in mirth. He knows that, objectively, he’s not exactly Romeo (though who’d want to be, the guy dies at the end), but he adores the way she glows when she’s laughing.

Halfway through dinner, as Darcy complains about her environmental law professor, Bobby remarks, “I still have almost all my law school outlines, if you want.”

“Nerd,” Wade fake-coughs, which sounds nothing like a cough and everything like the word _nerd_.

Darcy stops scooping whatever-that-brown-stuff-is onto her spoon to frown at him. “You gave me all your outlines six months ago,” she reminds him. “You had a highlighter color-code system that made _Steve_ look disorganized.”

“Shh, honey, the grown-ups are insulting each other,” Wade retorts, and she grins as she slaps his hand off her thigh and elbows him in the ribs.

Once the cardboard fish is mostly-eaten and Wade’s all but licked clean the bowl with the broccoli in it (seriously, Hank, how’d you screw up fish but turn broccoli into a religious experience?), Darcy hops up out of her chair and starts to collect plates along with the resident genius-charmer-doctor. 

“Oh, please, you’re a guest,” Hank insists, but Darcy just scoffs at him and snatches a fork right out of his hand.

“I’m the only girl with a bunch of messy brothers,” she informs him with a head-shake that causes her curls to sway. “Kitchen duty is my _jam_.”

It leaves the two of them in the kitchen together, laughing as they wash everything up, while Wade hovers in the living room and squints at the space-picture over the couch. Even though Bobby’s mentioned it a thousand times, he honestly can’t remember the name of the nebula. What he knows about it is that it’s a million miles away, it’s pink and gold, and it looks like Darcy’s laughter sounds. 

If that analogy even works.

He’s listening to Darcy explain the design for the newest Learned Hand Jobs t-shirt (inspired by, uhm, certain adult toys shaped like certain leaders of the free world), when Bobby comments, “She’s kind of fantastic.” 

He knows without looking that the other man’s hovering in the doorway like the barely-closeted busybody he is, but he’s enough of a sucker to turn and check, anyway. The lumberjack sleeves are rolled up, and when Bobby crosses the room, it’s to top off the wine in Wade’s glass.

Spoiler alert: the only alcoholic beverage Wade hates more than wine is lukewarm Bailey’s, but he shuts up and sips it anyway.

“Is this the part where you give me all sorts of thoughtful unsolicited advice about my relationship while I think about beating myself to death with your Guitar Hero accessories?” he asks. Because, let’s face it, that’s the tone of voice Bobby’s using, and it seems pretty dumb to go all the way upstairs just to throw himself out of the second-story window.

Bobby snorts something that might, in some cultures, be considered a laugh. “If you’re really hell-bent on killing yourself to avoid me, there’s a miniature version of _The Thinker_ in the bathroom that might work. It’s pretty heavy.”

“You have a tiny naked man watching you poop?”

“You had a plastic Pinky Pie in your bathroom for three weeks, Wade. I felt like I belonged on _To Catch a Predator_.” When Wade glances over, Bobby’s smiling. He’s a genuinely good guy, Bobby Drake-no-hyphen-McCoy, even if he’s tooth-rottingly sweet. Wade really, actually likes him, which is a new feeling.

Not new as in “he just now realized he likes Bobby.” New as in “he can count his actual, grown-up friends on less than a full hand.”

“And for the record,” he says while Wade’s still trying to fight against the fondness that’s crawling up from the bottom of his gut, “I wasn’t coming in here to give you unsolicited advice of any kind.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Is that a weird feeling for you? I mean, not torturing someone with your wise-and-knowing guru ways. It must be hard. Is it like gas pains or—”

Bobby elbows him then, laughing, and Wade abandons all semblance of not playing the straight guy and laughs along with him. They stand there for a long time, sort of chuckling and shaking their heads, half-finished wine in their grip and that big Darcy-laugh space-fart staring at them.

Finally, though, Bobby sort of sighs. Not at Wade, necessarily, but more at himself. Wade imagines he sighed like that when he realized he was totally gay for his boarding school roommate. “I know I can be sort of—”

“Nosy?” Wade offers, and Bobby frowns at him. “Overbearing? Like an elementary school teacher without a Halloween sweater? Matronly?”

“Yes,” Bobby says abruptly. It’s a shame, really, because Wade’d planned on using at least ten other synonyms for “super-maternal busybody.” Instead, he watches his friend turn his wine glass around in his hand. “I guess I worried—unnecessarily, too, because Darcy’s _fantastic_ —that you might get lost in this.”

“In having a girlfriend?” Wade asks. Bobby’s usually about as clear as freshly-Windexed glass, but right now he’s coming across like one of those fogged-up privacy windows in apartment bathrooms. He also nods, meaning it’s Wade’s turn to frown at him. “I mean, no offense, but where the hell would I _go_?”

“Go?” Bobby parrots.

“To get lost. Because being lost implies wandering off, aimless like when that deer wanders into my apartment complex sometimes, and I don’t—”

“Like I said,” Bobby interrupts, and he even raises his hands in the most delicious defeat Wade can imagine. “It was stupid.”

“Really stupid,” he agrees, and Bobby’s only comeback is a funny little lip-twitch he assumes is a smile.

 

==

 

The hallway at Darcy’s apartment complex smells like Indian spices and wet dog, which totally clashes with the way Darcy smells of vanilla and cinnamon, spicy and sweet both at the same time. He presses her against the wall of the stairwell landing, ignoring the sound of a crappy Western on somebody’s TV to focus on the way she claws at his winter coat and hooks her ankle around the back of his leg. He thinks maybe she wants to scale him, a sort of half-scrawny, one-balled Everest, but then her tongue sweeps against his teeth in a really indescribable way and he pushes her harder against the wall.

She lets out a sound he’s not used to, feral and hungry, and he feels his pulse in his ears.

“I’m supposed to make freaking placecards tomorrow,” she pants against his mouth around the exact time she forces his coat open, and he shivers when she drags her fingers down the length of his sides. He’s wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt with an undershirt beneath it—a hell of a long way from skin on skin—but he almost forgets how to translate sounds into words from how good it feels. “Jane left me freaking rubber stamps and paper-cutters—”

“Talk crafty to me,” Wade breathes, and Darcy chuckles into the kiss before ducking out of the way again.

“—and I’ll never get all of it done if I let you upstairs.”

“So I’ll help.”

He says it without thinking about it, like reciting one of those lines from scripture that everybody knows—“the lord is a sheep-herding guy” or “bring me your huddled masses yearning to be free,” maybe—but Darcy sucks in a sharp breath before he manages to kiss her neck, a sure sign that she’s not gasping at his _mouth_. Her fingers curl in his shirt, his fingers spread against the curve of her hip, and they end up standing there in silence for way, _way_ too long.

Especially since he’s sort of, uhm, pressed against her other hip in a way that threatens the sanctity of his boxers.

He wonders if the Western might be a war movie.

When Darcy asks, “Yeah?”, it’s shaky and uncertain, something out of a romance movie where the heroine’s about to be ravished in a field. Wade raises his head, and they watch each other: her with her kissable lips all swollen, red, and hungry; him with his heart fluttering around in his chest like a demented humming bird.

She’s pretty, the voice in the back of his head reminds him. She’s pretty, she’s smart, and the more disheveled her hair and skewed her winter scarf, the hotter she looks.

“Totally yeah,” he replies, and Darcy hitches her leg up much, _much_ higher when he kisses her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think saranoh believed me, but “certain adult toys shaped like certain leaders of the free world” [actually exist](http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/1015244/).


	6. Decisions, Good and Otherwise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade trips over himself. Not literally, that’d be totally embarrassing. But he figuratively trips over himself, and he’s not sure about the smoothness of his recovery. Then again, he is judging said recovery on the “Nate Summers seduces a waiter” scale, and— Look, read the chapter, then you’ll understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a very brief mention of underage kissing. It is literally less than a line. But just in case.
> 
> Continued thanks to Jen and saranoh, who caught no fewer than a dozen randomly missing letters in this chapter. Speed kills, kids. Specifically, speed-writing kills your spelling, and then you need awesome ladies like mine to mop up your mess.

“You did _what_?” Clint demands, stalking around his living room like a really angry dire wolf. You know, from that show about the awesome demanding blonde chick and all the people she screws over? There’re wolves in that, right? Anyway, he stalks around like the zookeeper forgot to feed him, and Wade sort of—flinches.

“You got the part of the text message where I admitted to screwing up and wanted help knowing what to do next, right?” he double-checks, because sometimes Sprint eats his messages, and the last thing he needs is—

“You mean the part after you admitted that you fucked Darcy and _snuck out down her fire escape_?” Clint returns.

“Uhm, yeah,” he answers, and lets Clint return to the angry pacing.

In his own defense— Okay, no, he can _hear_ you glaring at him, proof positive that there’s absolutely no defense whatsoever. Let’s back up. 

In his own stupid, unforgivable, idiotic mind, he’d really done the only thing he _could_ do. Yeah, okay, that sounds slightly less horrible.

And honestly, part of the problem is the not-horribleness of, well, everything. Because the night before’d gone from good (at Hank and Bobby’s) to really good (in the hallway) to _incredibly_ good (in the doorway to Darcy’s apartment where clothes started landing on the floor) in a series of unprecedentedly fortunate events. Yeah, that’s right, _fortunate_ , because Darcy’d meant her promise to climb him like a tree, and, uh.

You know how, sometimes, in the sexier Hollywood movies, the characters only end up half-naked because of how much they want the horizontal mambo? That also happened in real life, apparently. At least Darcy’d laughed when he’d offered to dry clean her sweater as a casualty of a very sexy war.

But afterwards, slightly-dressed and slightly-drowsy, Darcy’d curled up with her cheek against Wade’s arm and traced patterns on his thigh with her fingernails.

And _after_ -afterwards, still slightly-dressed but with Darcy out like a light, Wade’d found his jeans, his long-sleeved shirt, and his coat, scribbled a note, and—with no way to relock her door once he left—climbed down the fire escape in the dead of winter like some sort of recently-sexed cat burglar.

He is absolutely not proud of this decision, or the fact that he’d headed straight home, drunk three beers, and fell into the least-restful and most-regretful sleep of his life.

He’s also starting to doubt the wisdom of texting Clint for moral support, because—

“She’s going to murder you!” Clint announces, as though the thought’s never occurred to Wade in the last eight hours of bad decisions. Wade drags a hand over his face and then rests his forehead against the wall, because he’s nursing what’s either a hangover or a regret-over, and he’s not sure which is actually worse. “She’s going to murder you, _then_ me as an accomplice, and—”

“Yelling at seven-thirty might be a new record,” someone who sounds absolutely nothing like Clint interrupts, and Wade jerks away from the wall in time to witness Phil Coulson wandering into the living room. And not just any Phil Coulson, either, but limited-edition, plaid-boxers-wearing Phil Coulson, with a threadbare t-shirt and white gym socks and—

Oh, god.

Is Coulson a sex-sock guy? Is that why Clint’s sanity is currently dwindling, he’s shacking up with a guy who refuses to lose the footwear even when he’s doing the—

“Wade had sex with my trial assistant and then snuck out of her apartment,” Clint reports.

“Technically,” Wade offers, “she’s only one-third your trial assistant.”

Coulson glances between the two of them, his face stony and entirely unreadable. Wade hates that face, because it always hands his ass to him in the courtroom. “I need coffee before I can be part of this,” he decides, and disappears into Clint’s tiny kitchen.

Clint heaves a truly epic sigh and drags his fingers through his messy, hedgehog-like bedhead, a sure sign that he needs more coffee than the Starbucks that Wade’d brought him. Because his small consolation for the whole “texting in an emergency from your front stoop at seven-fifteen in the morning” at least involved a venti Americano with extra sugar.

You’re welcome, Clinton.

“I don’t— Where do I even _start_?” Clint asks, and Wade buckles his mouth shut instead of answering. Not because he’s not tempted to, but because the last time he’d answered one of Clint’s rhetorical questions, Clint’d smacked him upside the head in front of their whole muy thai class. “You had sex with your girlfriend—”

“Girl-space-friend.”

“—and then you left.” Wade nods. “You just left. No warning, no note—”

“Okay, wait, I get like one half-point of credit here,” Wade puts in, because right now he feels as though he’s ten seconds from Clint whipping off his bathrobe tie and strangling him to death. “I’m not entirely crass and classless. I left a note.”

Coulson wanders in and hands his practically-husband a fresh cup of cheap Folgers coffee—seriously, is there no appreciation for a three-buck French roast, anymore?—while said practically-husband glares figurative daggers at Wade. “Did it say, ‘Sorry, I’m a huge asshole about to act like an even bigger asshole because I fail at human relationships?’”

Wade opens his mouth, but Clint’s glare just darkens. He shuts his mouth and swallows, instead. “It, uh, just said I had to go.”

And you know it’s bad—seriously, monumentally, stop-every-press-in-the-universe _bad_ —when Phil Coulson sighs at you. 

“It’s complicated, okay?” Wade demands, but the way they both stare him down proves that complication really, _really_ isn’t good enough.

He wanders through Clint’s living room a little like the lost boy Bobby’d talked about the night before, one with absolutely no destination. Not that it’s a particularly big room, but, you know, the point absolutely stands. The windows overlook the parking lot, a sea of low- to mid-range cars that probably all belong to recent college grads or Disneyland dad divorcees, and Wade resists his urge to press his face against the glass. The only snow left at this point is all black and piled up in corners of the lot, nasty-looking icebergs of hopelessness that remind Wade of how his heart _feels_.

He wonders whether Darcy’s woken up yet. Probably. What post-sex nap _really_ lasts all night?

“I, uh, you’re not going to believe this, given my stunning good looks and whatever, but— Uh, does _he _really have to be in here while I go over this?”__

__Coulson cranes his head up from where he, Wade shits you not, is starting to work on the Sunday crossword puzzle. In his boxers and t-shirt, coffee in hand, tucked up in a corner of the couch like he actually lives there._ _

__“Me?” he asks, and Wade nods at him. “You want me to leave at this point? After I’ve already heard about the fuck-and-run incident?”_ _

__Okay, Wade’s pretty sure the emotional stress is now officially causing hallucinations, because there’s no way Coulson just used the word _fuck_ in a sentence._ _

__“There’s no way you just used the word _fuck_ in a sentence.”_ _

__“No, he’s a total puritan prude, that’s why he’s wandering around in a spare pair of my boxers,” Clint retorts with an eye-roll, and oh god, Wade now officially needs to throw his brain in one of those oil drum fires hobos use, because _no_. He knocks his head against the window trim while Clint drops his ass onto the couch next to the potty-mouthed Coulson. “He’s not totally useless in the advice department.”_ _

__“A stunning endorsement,” Coulson responds, and sips his coffee._ _

__“And, failing that, he can probably write you a pretty good recommendation for a legal aid office in another county. Because moving away’s the only way to keep Darcy from _murdering_ you.”_ _

__Wade leans his back against the wall and crosses his arms. He wonders whether he looks intimidating or just exhausted. “Is the only possible outcome here my untimely and probably messy death?” he asks._ _

__“Yes,” Clint and Coulson both inform him, in creepy relationship unison, and Wade sighs as he rolls his head back against the wall._ _

__He stands there like that for a while, or at least what feels like a while, listening to the hum of Clint’s heater and the little affirmative noises that burble out of Coulson as he completes his crossword. Their life is normal and functional, Wade thinks, and a whole different universe from the kind of crap he’s used to. The kind of crap he _causes_ , really, because he keeps making these really awful beds and then lying in them._ _

__He rubs a hand over his stubble and then, finally, opens his eyes to stare at Clint’s ceiling._ _

__“I hadn’t had sex since undergrad,” he says, just flat-out and into the open like that, and he knows from the way Clint swears that he just poured coffee on himself._ _

__Cheap Folgers-brand coffee, at least, coffee he can probably wash out of his boxers if he tries. Unless he’s actually wearing _Coulson’s_ boxers, but Wade tries not to think too hard about that one. Instead, he watches Clint mop up the spill with the newspaper’s business section and forces himself to keep on trucking. “After the ball cancer thing, I— I mean, there are other reasons, but I went from feeling like a slight freak to a complete freak. And it sort of made sense to just, you know, go cold turkey instead of trying to fight the freak feeling.”_ _

__“So you— Jesus, Phil, did you nuke that before you handed it to me?” Clint asks. Coulson shrugs and continues penciling in a word on the puzzle, and his definitely-better half tosses his bit of newspaper onto the coffee table. “So, what, you were out of practice and it sucked, and that’s why—”_ _

__“No, no, it _didn’t_ suck,” Wade retorts. He tries to wave the mere concept out of the air between them, because of all the possible complaints he could lodge about last night, _sucking_ is not one. Not in any understanding of the verb, either, because—_ _

__Well._ _

__“Sex is like riding a bike,” he continues, “not that I was the one doing the—”_ _

__“Wade,” Clint interrupts, and it sounds more like a warning than anything else. Their eyes meet across the room, and when Wade starts to open his mouth again, Clint shakes his head very, very slowly._ _

__Like Jack Nicholson said in that army movie, some people can’t handle the truth._ _

__“It was good,” he says, wetting his lips, “and we had fun, I just— Uh. There are things, about me, that didn’t come up last night, but if they _do_ , I—” He shakes his head. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he finishes, because that is the honest-to-god singing-muse gospel truth._ _

__Clint watches him for a couple seconds without saying anything, his face caught somewhere between comprehension and pretty raw confusion. Wade sort of understands the confusion, because, well, his whole speech sounds more like confessing to herpes than anything innocuous._ _

__(He’s clean, by the way. For the record, and all that.)_ _

__But it’s not Clint who says, “Everyone has a ‘thing,’ Wade.”_ _

__Coulson’s all placid-faced and perfectly calm when he looks up from his crossword puzzle, pencil in one hand and coffee mug in the other, but his eyes are this predatory kind of sharp that suits Clint. A lot of Coulson suits Clint, not that Wade’d ever own to it aloud; they’re both smart as hell and quick-witted, they both think really well on their feet, and they both tend to notice stuff that normal people miss._ _

__Which is why Wade asks, “Thing?” instead of challenging him outright on that theory. Because if Coulson says it, he’s probably onto something._ _

__“Relationships require commitment,” he continues, mostly as if Wade’d never said anything, his shoulders lifting in the world’s smallest shrug. “They require the ability to step outside yourself and abandon at least some small part of yourself. And, because of that, almost everyone develops some sort of excuse _not_ to open up. A sordid past, maybe—”_ _

__“Hey, I’m _right_ here,” Clint complains._ _

__“—a difficult childhood, a pathological fear of being abandoned—”_ _

__“That’s Natasha,” Clint volunteers, and Wade closes his mouth before the question pops out._ _

__Coulson rolls his eyes. “My point,” he says, before he’s interrupted again, “is that everyone finds a good reason to run away from a relationship, or down a fire escape. The question is whether you’re willing to overcome it.”_ _

__He’s serious-faced and solemn as he says it, and Wade feels sort of uncomfortably small in his own skin. Then again, he’s usually uncomfortable in his own skin, so the sensation’s not all that new. When Coulson finally glances away to turn back to his crossword puzzle, Clint remarks, “He has a point.”_ _

__“I know,” Wade admits, which sounds foreign to his own ears. “I’m trying to deal with how _sensible_ it sounds. Convincing myself your boyfriend’s not a pod-person, and all that.”_ _

__“Your motion for downward departure was ludicrous,” Coulson remarks, this time without looking up._ _

__“See? There we go, balance restored to the universe,” Wade replies, and he’s not sure how he feels about the fact that Clint laughs at that._ _

__He’s trudging through the parking lot in the bitter late-January cold, his teeth nearly chattering and his fingertips feeling mostly like ice, when his cell phone chimes in his pocket. He rolls his eyes at it, ninety-nine percent sure it’s Clint with one of his staircase comments—because that’s what you call it when you come up with comebacks after the fact, they’re staircase comebacks—and waits until he’s in the car to answer it._ _

__Problem is, it’s not actually from Clint._ _

__**Darcy:** _give me one good reason why i shouldn’t hunt you down and kill you.__ _

__You know that saying about blood running cold? About veins turning to ice and hearts stopping and chills like a ghost just goosed you? (One of those might not be an actual thing, now that he thinks about it.) Well, all of them happen to Wade at the same time the second he reads that damn message. He reads it the one time, then again, his stomach churning in its emptiness and his head hurting a lot more than maybe it should. He’s still in the t-shirt he never stripped out of last night, plus the sweatpants he’d worn to Clint’s, but he feels like he’s naked in a snow bank._ _

__Hey, he was a string-bean in middle school. He was the _king_ of naked nerds in snow banks, back then._ _

__He taps the screen to keep it from locking and then types in practically the worst response in the world._ _

___im sorry_ _ _

__Because, although it’s absolutely not a lie and although he feels less than two feet tall, his two-word reply inspires an immediate return message:_ _

__**Darcy:** _THEN WHY THE HELL DID YOU LEAVE?!?!?!__ _

__And yeah, the capslock is genuine, thanks._ _

__Wade knows the question sort of requires an answer—lest he be murdered in some kind of spectacularly painful way by a very pretty girl with curves in all the right places—but he’s not entirely sure which one it deserves. He knows Coulson’s right, that people pretty much hoard excuses to avoid the emotional bits of relationships, but he also knows that his story’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s more complicated than ball cancer, too, but he can count on one hand the number of people who actually _get_ it._ _

__Not know it, but _get_ it._ _

__He stares at Darcy’s message. The wind rattles the loose back window in his Metro._ _

__Eventually, though, he opens a reply message._ _

___this is super embarrassing_ , he types carefully, actually spelling things out for once, _but dinner turned straight to liquid and not in a good way.__ _

__There’s literally a two-second delay before Darcy replies, _ew, wade, tmi_._ _

___u asked_ , he defends._ _

___not for that detail, i didn’t._ He smiles a little, imagining the little lip-curl that accompanied her justifiable disgust, but he’s interrupted by another message chiming through. _if you’re feeling better later, i could still use some help on this pinterest torture project jane set me up with.__ _

___sure_ , he immediately sends back, and he waits until he receives a smiley-face confirmation text before he tosses his phone into the passenger seat._ _

__He supposes he should feel better about the whole thing—his running behavior explained, the apology readily accepted, another date tentatively planned for whenever his overnight stomach bug subsides—but in truth, he feels worse. His stomach hurts, his chest feels tight, and he wants more than anything to lean his head against the steering wheel and freeze to death. Because, after all, if he freezes to death in his car, he can avoid human interaction forever._ _

__Then again, maybe feeling better about a problem like this only happens when you don’t fix the problem by lying._ _

__Wade’s not sure, but it’s also a little late to find out._ _

__

__==_ _

__

__“We all know that a downward departure from a sentence—especially one that’s about to land a guy in prison—relies on a whole lot of factors,” Wade says, shrugging a little. He’s holding onto the podium harder than he maybe should, but then again, Judge Nguyen’s staring him down. He thinks sometimes that the judge arranged to have her smiling muscles surgically removed, because her lips never twitch out of her usual permafrown. “We’ve got to look at age, record, his behavior after the crime, the support of the people around him, and whether there’s a program for him _outside_ of the prison setting that’d benefit society more than locking the guy up in the clink.”_ _

__He thinks—not totally sure, mind you, because he’s focusing on Judge Nguyen and _not_ opposing counsel—that Coulson frowns at him. He knows that Coulson’s snotty little intern with the bad haircut mutters something under his breath._ _

__Wade sort of hates interns._ _

__He also sort of hates Judge Nguyen’s cavernous courtroom, the one where every little noise echoes like he’s using a bullhorn. At defense table, his client—thirty-seven year old Alec Albright, a greasy-haired ex-rocker who beat the snot out of a guy with a pool cue thanks to a PCP-laced joint—keeps shifting around, and the vinyl squeaks amplify in a way that makes Wade want to claw his ears off. Alec’s actually not a jackass, just an idiot trying to decide between being a giant man-child or a middle-aged stereo technician, and he looks pretty human in khakis and a button-down._ _

__He also looks just a little strung-out, but, well, that PCP-laced joint sure as hell didn’t smoke itself._ _

__Wade loosens his grip on the podium just enough that the feeling returns to his fingertips. “I’m not that attorney who wants to rehash his motion in front of the court, ‘cause I know the court can read,” he continues, and the intern snorts. Wade wants to punch him. “But Mister Albright never once tried to run from this. He admits to smoking the joint, he owned up to what happened that night, and even the victim says he knows the whole thing spiraled out of everybody’s control.” He shakes his head. “Yeah, his criminal history leaves a lot to be desired. And yeah, according to the sentencing guidelines, he should end up in an institution for two, two-and-a-half years. But how’s that going to help society?”_ _

__When he glances over at Alec, Alec’s chewing his lip hard enough that Wade suspects he’s drawing blood. He jerks his head, a sort of universal _knock it off_ motion, but Alec interprets it as _would the real joint-smoking defendant please stand up?_ Wade waves him down, and the guy straightens up to his full height. Eh, better than nothing._ _

__“He wants to go to rehab, your honor,” Wade continues, and Alec nods like somebody’s just replaced his batteries. “He wants to get his life, which kind of veered off track over the last couple years, back in gear. His boss testified he’s willing to keep him on, his court supervision officer thinks he can pull it off, he just kind of needs the court’s approval to get his life back underway.” He glances over at Alec, who just keeps nodding._ _

__Okay, then._ _

__“Thanks, judge.”_ _

__Judge Nguyen nods, still not smiling, and then gestures to Coulson. Coulson, man, he moves smooth as silk up to that podium, his legal pad in his grip and his face completely blank. Wade can’t read him. Wade hates that he can’t read him._ _

__He also hates that, two days ago, Coulson found out how rarely he participates in two-player chicken-choking, but hey, you work with what you’ve got._ _

__“Mister Wilson correctly states the law,” he begins, and Wade starts to draw mental stars around his undisputed victory, “but he’s attempting to overlook the facts of this case. The fact that Mr. Albright went into that bar to buy drugs, bought the drugs, _smoked_ the drugs—”_ _

__“Objection,” Wade interrupts, and yeah, most of his reasoning’s all caught up in the fact that Alec’s turned ghost-pale and started digging his fingernails into his leg. Wade’s leg, not Alec’s own leg. He’d worry less about Alec’s own leg. “Your honor, there’s a plea entered in this case, these allegations—”_ _

__“Were part of the factual basis for the plea, Mister Wilson,” Judge Nguyen interrupts. She hardly blinks. Wade wonders if she’s an alien. “Continue, Mister Coulson.”_ _

__“Thank you,” Coulson says tightly, and waits for Wade to plop back down. “Mister Albright went to a bar for drugs, ingested those drugs, and, while under the influence of the same drugs, cracked a pool cue over his knee and beat Terry Landry. Mister Landry, who spent three weeks in the intensive care unit, thanks to Mister Albright’s actions.” Coulson opens his hands like a choir director. Wade can almost imagined the hummed start pitch. “His criminal history is long, involving multiple drug charges, theft charges, and at least one other battery. And while it’s true that many of these convictions are old, Mister Albright’s never stabilized his life long enough to expunge any one of them.”_ _

__Wade considers muttering _unlike your boyfriend_ , but adversarial bros before adversarial— Huh. He wonders if Coulson counts as a ho._ _

__“All the remorse and forgiveness in the world can’t change those facts,” Coulson continues, and he sounds the whole time like he’s really buying his own bullshit. Wade clamps his jaw shut before anything else pops out of his mouth. “And they can’t change the fact that Mister Landry almost died as a result of the defendant’s actions.” He glances over at defense table, and Wade nudges Alec in the leg so he’ll sit up straight again. “Ten years ago, if the Alec Albright with less of a criminal history came in here and argued the same, I might say differently,” he says, and it’s not entirely without compassion, either. “Right now, though, the downward departure is not appropriate.”_ _

__He thanks the judge and then walks back to counsel table, all Coulson-smooth and unruffled that Wade actually raises a hand and runs it over his tie to make sure it’s not cinched up all Dilbert-style. Not that he really believes Coulson could do that by sheer force of will or anything, but because—_ _

__Okay._ _

__Strictly speaking, there’s no good reason for it._ _

__But his tie’s nice and straight, so he pushes to his feet._ _

__“Briefly, Mister Wilson,” Judge Nguyen warns in that voice that suggests she’s already decided the outcome and is now considering lunch._ _

__“Thank you,” Wade replies, and stands in front of the podium. He stares at it for a second, all blank and woody, and he tries to summon up the words he wants. Instead, he ends up staring at the laptop cord hole for, like, a full minute._ _

__“Coulson— The state, I mean. The state’s right.” He raises his hands in a gesture that really transforms into a shrug. “Alec Albright today isn’t Alec Albright ten years ago. He’s made more mistakes. He’s screwed-up more times. And he broke a pool cue and made a really, _really_ stupid call on how to spend a Saturday night.” He rests his hands where a notepad’s meant to go. “But the law doesn’t list ‘level of screw-up’ as one of the factors. No, that’s lumped in that last factor, the one that asks whether society’s better or worse off having the guy—the defendant—out on the street instead of locked up.”_ _

__Wade looks over at Alec, whose leg keeps jumping like there’s a motor running, and he sort of shakes his head. “Judge, I really don’t know whether society’s going to be better off having the defendant—my client—on probation. I don’t know if he’s going to do every single thing he’s supposed to.” When he turns his head forward again, Judge Nguyen’s staring at him. Even though she terrifies him enough that he sort of wants to wet his bed, he stares right back. “But I know that, for the first time ever, he’s actually asking to try this out and fix the ten years of screw-ups, and I think it’s always better to give the guy who wants to try a chance when there’s also a program waiting for him. That’s all.”_ _

__Alec grips his hand when he sits back down, and try as he might, Wade really can’t shake the guy off. He ends up with fingernails digging into his palm while Judge Nguyen removes her glasses and sets them on the bench. “Counsel each makes salient points,” she notes, which sounds hopeful enough that Wade almost lets himself smile. “Our penal system is built on balancing punish and rehabilitation, and Mister Albright has shown more remorse than many of our defendants. But we also need to protect innocent individuals—individuals who, like Terry Landry, can’t always defend against the poor choices and ‘screw ups’ of men with a pattern of behavior like Mister Albright. And that makes the court’s job today very difficult.”_ _

__Alec’s whole body trembles when he rises, and Wade tugs his hand away before rising with him. At the state’s table, Coulson sits forward, almost like he might be worried about the outcome. Ludicrous motion, Wade’s supple and yet firm a—_ _

__“Alec Francis Albright, I hereby sentence you to a sentence of twenty-eight months to be served with the state department of corrections,” Judge Nguyen says, and Wade closes his eyes the precise second that Alec lets out a sob like he’s been stabbed._ _

__The rest of the hearing proceeds rather quickly, just all the rote sentencing language about post-release supervision and the right to appeal, but Wade only half-listens to it. He clasps Alec on the arm and promises that the whole situation’ll turn out okay, but Alec’s crying like a teenager who just got dumped and really can’t respond. He’s escorted out by the deputies and Wade’s left standing there like an asshole._ _

__Appropriate, since he feels a little like one, and—_ _

__“You had difficult facts,” Coulson says behind him, and Wade grits his teeth together to keep from mouthing off in front of the weasely little intern who follows the guy around like a puppy. Said intern’s actually engaged in a serious-looking conversation with Alec’s court supervision officer. Great. “I think a lot of attorneys wouldn’t have made the argument. Extra paper, extra-long hearing, and you know how Nguyen is.”_ _

__“She hates a long criminal history,” Wade replies with a nod, because Coulson’d explained that to him the first time Nguyen served up a platter of Wilson-ass during a sentencing argument._ _

__“Loathes it. In fact, I think the only person more turned off by a long criminal history is Steve.”_ _

__Wade snorts. “Is that how his husband gets out of sex? ‘Sorry, honey, I’ve got a five-misdemeanor history dating five years back?’”_ _

__“Probably,” Coulson returns, and the little lip-twist that counts as a smile in Coulsontopia actually feels like a huge gift._ _

__The intern lags behind as they emerge out into the hallway, Wade with his crappy bag slung over his shoulder and Coulson armed with nothing but his legal pad. Not for the first time, Wade considers how kick-ass it’d be to have a tag-along like an intern. Just one who’d never speak or expect him to hand out instructions._ _

__“About the other morning,” Wade starts to say once they’re out of the usual throng of Tuesday morning court-goers, but Coulson proverbially waves him off with a shrug._ _

__“I’ve conveniently forgotten every mildly-horrifying personal confession I heard,” he promises, complete with that hint of humor that reminds Wade how actually-awesome the Barton-slash-Coulson sexual team-up really is. “And given that Darcy voluntarily brought in bagels yesterday—”_ _

__“Is she usually forced?”_ _

__“It’s part of the ‘indentured servitude’ trial assistant package, yes,” Coulson replies blandly, and Wade almost laughs. Almost. Because the joke, for the record, is _almost_ funny. “My point is that it appears that everything’s back to normal.”_ _

__“Yeah,” Wade says, and adjusts his bag on his shoulder. He super-briefly considers spilling his guts about lying to Darcy, then about helping her with Jane’s baby shower goodie bags, making out on her couch, and how Darcy’s mom’d called and the whole thing devolved into a phone-fight—but he keeps his mouth shut. At least, until his mouth pops open and he blurts, “What’s your thing?”_ _

__They’re standing in front of the employees-only entrance, the one that leads to the Barton-Coulson sex stairs and also to the parking lot, and Coulson stops pretty abruptly. Like, abruptly enough that Wade almost slams into the glass doors. “Excuse me?”_ _

__“You talked about how everybody has a thing that keeps them out of relationships, right? Childhoods, pasts, fears, spiders—”_ _

__“I don’t remember spiders.”_ _

__“—that, I dunno, interferes with being emotionally open or whatever way insightful thing you said Sunday.” Wade really wishes he knew whether Coulson’s lip-twitch qualified as a smile or gas pain. He toes a little at the rubbery rug on the floor. “I wondered if you had one.”_ _

__This time, he’s almost entirely sure it’s a smile, just not a particularly warm one. “Everyone has one,” Coulson says again._ _

__“So—”_ _

__“So I went a very long time without being in a relationship,” he continues, shaking his head a little. “I focused on my work, kept my head down, built the career I wanted without ever really thinking about my future.” When he raises his head, he catches Wade’s eyes. Wade _can_ read the honesty in his expression, the bare-faced and unshakable truth that strangles a little air out of Wade’s lungs. “And then I met someone, and fell more quickly than— Well, than I ever thought possible, I think. I spent a lot of time trying to stand on that, because it felt safer than admitting the truth.”_ _

__He shrugs slightly, the barest of shoulder-lifts under his navy suit coat, and this time, Wade’s the one employing the soft-lipped and enigmatic half-smile. “So your only ‘thing’ is the one you threw in the way of you and Clint?”_ _

__“No,” Coulson replies. “But at least, for right now, it’s the only one I’m willing to admit to.”_ _

__Wade will never in a million years unless faced with certain and inevitable death admit this out loud, but right then?_ _

__Right then, he really fucking likes Phil Coulson._ _

__Less when, all of thirty seconds later, Clint texts him _stop arguing with my boyfriend I want to grope him in his office_ , but, you know._ _

__Baby steps, and whatever._ _

__

__==_ _

__

__“You have _got_ to come with me to this shower or I might actually kill myself,” Darcy announces to the entire Dairy Queen on Wednesday night._ _

__Wade looks up from his box of breaded mushrooms. He orders them every time, and every time, they fail to live up to his monumental expectations. He blames the Republicans. Or maybe the Communists._ _

__Either way, Darcy’s hair is frizzed within an inch of its life thanks to the sleety conditions outside, and her eyes dart around behind her glasses like she might actually mean the threat._ _

__Which is why he responds by asking, “Should I call the mental health hotline?”_ _

__“I can also kill you,” she points out, and he laughs as he slides her a double cheeseburger with bacon._ _

__Dairy Queen, Wade discovered years ago, is the perfect place for a speedy fast-food dinner in the dead of winter because nobody—no, seriously, absolutely nobody—bothers with the place when it’s too cold for ice cream. Presently, the dining room is populated by himself, the Darcinator, a tired-looking woman with two very wound-up kids, and then a creepy sixty-something guy wearing socks with sandals despite the sleet. The kids shrill _Dora the Explorer_ songs while the mom sighs into her French fries, the creepy guy with the bad taste in footwear keeps reading the battered-up leather-bound book he brought in, and Darcy—_ _

__“Hey!” Wade complains as Darcy trades half her onion rings (ordered via text message with Wade as an intermediary) for half his breaded mushrooms._ _

__“Yeah, like you planned on eating all of them,” she retorts, and pops one in her mouth just to prove her point._ _

__She’s still dressed in work clothes and half-ensconced in her winter gear, all bedraggled and wild-looking as a feral child raised by wolves. Wade knows school and Jane are each about forty-nine percent to blame (with work stealing away with the left-over couple percentage points), mostly because she’s spent the last two days sending off text messages like some sort of running commentary. She’s responsible for half the party food at the baby shower (Jane’s future mother-in-law’s catering the rest, apparently), she’s stuck working on a group project for her class on negotiable instruments, she’s studying for the professional ethics exam, and—_ _

__“She’s crazy,” Darcy announces. Half of her burger’s already gone. Wade wonders whether she ate lunch._ _

__He also stops swirling his chicken finger through delicious white gravy to glance over at her. “Jane?”_ _

__“Who else?” she demands. She shakes her head as she snags a ketchup packet. Wade’s never met anyone who loves ketchup-slathered burgers as much as Darcy Lewis loves ketchup-slathered burgers. “We had this whole plan, right? Pasta salad, this weird jello thing with, like, marshmallow fluff or something, a salad-salad, and veggie tray. That’s _it_. I pony all that up, Frigga caters whatever crazy lutefisk nightmare she’s into—” _ _

__“I can’t decide whether to look terrified at the menu or her _name_ ,” Wade offers, and Darcy pauses just long enough to flash a grin at him._ _

__“—and everybody lives happily ever after.” She flips loose hair over her shoulder and reaches for another onion ring. “Now,” she stresses, drawing the syllable out past the point of no return, “she wants potato salad, some weird pudding dessert thing I’ve never _heard_ of, and she’s not sold on the veggie tray. Which I already ordered, by the way, with my own money because the girls and I all agreed to settle up _after_ this cradle-themed nightmare is over!”_ _

__She punctuates the end of her monologue by tearing into the onion ring like a wolf might attach a piece of meat, and Wade hides his grin by sipping his soda. Hey, it is absolutely and in no way his fault that Darcy is adorable when stressed out and angry, okay? He only hides his reactions out of self-preservation, he swears._ _

__Self-preservation, followed promptly by the urge to comfort her. Because as soon as the rant’s over, she looks forlorn rather than fired up. She chews her burger thoughtfully while Wade asks, “Is there anything I can help with?”_ _

__“Yeah, you can _come_ ,” she says._ _

__“I’m not exactly an expert on the breeding rituals of very large Swedes and very tiny scientists, but I’m pretty sure they pat you down for boobs at the door.”_ _

__Darcy rolls her eyes. “I need someone to keep me from murdering her, Wade,” she replies. Funny thing is, she sounds absolutely genuine about the whole thing. “Maria’s promised to keep the mimosas flowing—”_ _

__“Maria ‘kissed the boys and made them wet themselves in fear’ Hill is not the selling point you think she is,” he interrupts._ _

__“—but Jane’s just—” She clamps her mouth shut and, instead of finishing the thought, shakes her head. “This whole surprise-pregnancy thing’s been stupid-hard on her, and I get that,” she continues after a couple seconds of poking her burger bun. “I’m trying really hard to do the good friend thing and not rip her head off at the neck, and that’s why I need a— God, what are those people called?”_ _

__“Awesome guy you’re consistently dating who also doubles as a Prince Charming in the case of awkward social situations?” Wade suggests. Without thinking, by the way, which is explains why his ears only burn about the whole “dating” thing _after_ he’s blurted it out and not, you know, _before_._ _

__“No, not that,” she returns. Wade’s slightly comforted by the fact she didn’t notice the completely unstrategic reference to dating one another. “Those people at the gym who make sure you don’t kill yourself on the bench press.”_ _

__He frowns. “Spotters?”_ _

__“Right!” She snaps her fingers, then realizes there’s ketchup smeared on the one and licks it right off. “I need a spotter, but for making sure I don’t blow up at Jane.”_ _

__“And I’m the person for the job?” he asks. Not because he entirely doubts her logic—actually, her logic’s pretty logical, enough that Spock’d be proud and everything—but because he wants to make sure he’s keeping up with the conversation._ _

__Darcy nods as she reaches for her burger. “Why not?” she retorts. “You’re great at distraction, you’re kind of charming, and you are my boy-space-friend.”_ _

__She says it just like that—boy-space-friend, no hesitation or resentment caught in the back of her tone—and Wade promptly forgets how words actually work. Darcy keeps on eating, totally unbothered, and only pauses to raise an eyebrow at him when she reaches for her soda. Honestly, Wade suspects she would’ve let him sit in silence a lot longer if she wasn’t also thirsty._ _

__“About that—” he finally offers, because he feels compelled to say _something_ and the quiet might actually kill him totally and completely dead._ _

__“Look,” she interrupts, and sets down her cup with a sort of resounding cardboard _clunk_. “Back in undergrad, right, when I was young and perky and didn’t understand that girls with curves can still rock the hell out of bikinis—”_ _

__“You will demonstrate that last part at some point, right?” Wade asks, and she reaches all the way across the table to smack him upside the head. Misses, by the way, because he ducks, but at least she tries._ _

__She steals a chicken finger, too._ _

__Wade knows how she keeps the curves, but he’ll never complain about that._ _

__“Anyway,” she continues, and bathes her bounty in—you guessed it—ketchup. “I was in this sorority for, like, three months. I’d wanted to prove I could do it, you know, sort of beat the blonde bimbo stereotype and parade around a little extra awesome, but the girls were totally horrible.” She jabs the chicken finger in his direction. “And you know the most horrible part of it?”_ _

__“I’m still thinking of curvy girls in bikinis,” he admits. Darcy rolls her eyes while she laughs, which feels mostly like endorsement, so he presses on. “Are we talking itty-bitty-teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikinis here? The flimsy white kind that should never get wet but inevitably does? The stringy ones that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination in all the best ways?”_ _

__“Teal, boy shorts, with some beading on the straps,” she informs him, and bites into the chicken strip. Generous of her, really, since Wade requires at least a minute and a half to process that information._ _

__Maybe more than that, actually, because he wonders if Darcy turns all summer-baked bronze to accompany the teal, and if _that’s_ the case— _ _

__“The worst part,” she says once she’s swallowed, forcing Wade back into winter-garbed reality, “is the fact that they spent more time worried about their status with guys than they did about _life_. Not that all of them were, like, relationship-obsessed, but there was this culture there where every connection required a _label_.” She shakes her head, then tucks her hair behind her ear. “I’m not like that.”_ _

__“You glared at me about girl-space-friend,” Wade points out, because it is literally the only response that crawls into his mind._ _

__She snorts at him. “I glared at you for turning weird the second Hank called me your girlfriend,” she replies, and reaches for her last onion ring. “I’m not going to start patting you down for ring boxes or naming our two-point-five kids just because somebody used the dreaded g-word, you know.”_ _

__“Sergei and Sergeietta,” he says without even a second’s pause, and Darcy stops dipping her onion ring in ketchup to frown at him. “Our two-point-five kids,” he explains, shrugging. “Sergei, Sergeietta, and— I don’t know, we can name the half-kid after Clint.”_ _

__“Oh, honey, that is _never_ happening,” she informs him, and credit where credit is due, they each make it a whole ten seconds before they burst out laughing. _ _

__

__==_ _

__“We’re in public,” Bobby complains, and reaches for his beer._ _

__Wade stops drinking. The electric-blue slush in his glass that’s parading around and pretending to be a cocktail slowly starts sliding down inside his straw. “So?”_ _

__“So— No, Wade,” Bobby half-sputters, and Wade knows from the way his buddy necks his drink that victory is all but assured._ _

__The bar area at the local Chili’s is packed to capacity with two categories of Saturday-night family restaurant goers. Category one consists entirely of twenty-something women with flimsy tops drinking fruity cocktails and filling the pit of high-top tables with their bell-like laughter. They flirt a lot with their very pretty, very gay waiter, call each other “whore” on auto-repeat, and generally make Wade very glad that all the women he knows can murder him with a glare. Category two, on the other hand, is the group of guys lined up at the bar and watching some basketball game on the big-screen there. They’re loud, chest-thumping, back-patting guys with a female bartender they keep wolf-whistling at, and they make Wade glad that he and his friends probably belong mostly to category one._ _

__He likes category one. He feels full and warm as part of category one, though admittedly, that might have more to do with his huge platter of fajitas and his two electric lemonades. He stabs his straw through the once-frozen sludge in the bottom of his glass and hones his attention in on Nate._ _

__Nate just raises his eyebrows. It’s a silent little _yes?_ , a question unbounded by the limitations of the human vocal cord structure (or whatever), and maybe even a bit of a challenge. Nate likes a challenge, Wade knows. He’s spent the last two days issuing little battles of wits about Emma’s project, daring Wade to find bugs that Nate himself’s struggling with._ _

__Wade’s risen to the occasion every time._ _

__Hey, don’t make that dirty. No, you were thinking it, don’t lie._ _

__Wade sighs and thumps his glass down on their table. They’re in a booth, not one of the high tops, and he feels like the wood’s more substantial for it. “You don’t want to go to Chuck E. Cheese and play skeeball—”_ _

__“Pretty sure we’d be physically escorted off the premises,” Bobby points out._ _

__“—you don’t want to go see the latest ‘guns and cars and blowing things up’ movie—”_ _

__“I’m fairly sure _Fast and Furious 27_ is not an actual film,” Nate interrupts with a little head-shake._ _

__“—and now, you don’t want to play truth or dare.” He squints in Bobby’s direction, like maybe this is more an eyesight problem than a _Bobby Drake completely lacks a normal person’s sense of adventure_ thing. “Are you secretly a Communist? Is that what this is about? You’re avoiding fun and joy because you’d rather be in the bread ration line?”_ _

__Nate snorts something that Wade’s absolutely sure is a laugh, but Bobby, probably because he’s Bobby, just rolls his eyes. “You’re right,” he returns, snagging a chip from their basket of truly bottomless tortilla chips (sorry, cute waiter, but if you promise bottomless, you _deliver_ ). “This has everything to do with my secret Communism and nothing to do with the fact that we’re a little old for awkward public truth or dare.”_ _

__“Nope!” Such an extreme amount of nope, in fact, that Wade snares the cup of salsa and slides it all the way over against the wall, completely out of Bobby’s reach. Nate sips his margarita to hide the tiny smile that’s playing across his lips. Wade likes that smile. “One is never too old for truth or dare. Ever. It is, in fact, not a thing that is actually possible in this reality.”_ _

__Bobby rolls his eyes and chomps down on his chip plain, obviously not in the mood to argue against a law of nature like that, but Nate sets down his drink with this funny little appreciative sound. Almost like a purr, really, but then he’s grabbing a chip of his own and reaching across Wade to help himself to the salsa. His arms, for the record, are crazy huge and _muscular_. _ _

__“I think I beg to differ,” Nate says. At least, Wade thinks that’s what he says. Man-arm’s distracting sometimes, okay?_ _

__But then, the distraction’s gone, Nate licking salsa off his thumb not unlike how he’d licked soy sauce off his thumb during their working dinner of Chinese food the night before, and Wade can find words again. “You can beg all you want, Nathan Dewdrop Summers—”_ _

__“243,” Nate puts in without any vocal inflection in the least._ _

__“—but you’d still be wrong.” Wade snatches up his glass and gestures with a flourish. “And because of that epic and truly terrible wrongness, you have to go first.”_ _

__Across the table from them, Bobby sighs. “We’re still in public,” he reminds them both._ _

__“Then you’d better choose wisely when it comes around to your turn,” Wade retorts, and finishes off his boozy deliciousness._ _

__Honesty being worth a thousand words and everything, the truth is that Wade’s had a pretty spectacular week. Sure, Coulson walked away with the victory on the sentencing motion and everything, but a brief run-down of his other triumphs can be listed as follows:_ _

___1\. Received the last bits and pieces of evidence for his upcoming trial against Natasha “I will kill you and then eat your heart” Romanoff._  
2\. Ate an awesome Dairy Queen dinner with his girl-space-friend.  
3\. Found a totally unoffensive set of funny baby bibs for Jane and Thor (because baby showers require presents, right?)  
4\. Snagged two new, non-asshole clients.  
5\. Finished another form, top-to-bottom, with Nathan Sugarpuss Summers (not his actual middle name).  
6\. Chili’s bar area truth or dare. 

__He’s not totally sure on the last one, if he’s honest, but he’s spent the last twenty-four hours being not entirely sure about Nate. Because Nate’d shown up to their scheduled project time with a massive bag of Chinese food, complimented him on a couple of the bugs he’d found, and at one point, let him lean over and peer at the forms on the double-monitor thing to make sure everything looked right._ _

__In short, Nate’d stopped being weird for the first time since the weirdness _started_ , and Wade’d kind of loved every minute of it._ _

__He’s thinking about saying that, too—you know, in a not-awkward, not-sentimental, not-stupid way—when Nate leans back in the booth and says, “Dare.”_ _

__The word is immediately punctuated by Bobby choking on a mouthful of beer hard enough that Wade thinks he might spray it all over the table. As it stands, he sort of clutches his chest and doubles over far enough that he almost shoves his face in the basket of chips. Nate slides the chips out of the way, Wade sort of nudges his water glass a few inches closer (just in case), and Bobby—_ _

__Bobby gasps for breath like a cartoon character who’s about to drown. “You’re kidding,” he spits out._ _

__Nate shrugs and helps himself to another chip. “The best way to discourage him is to go along with him,” he replies, which is an absolute, complete, and total lie._ _

__“That’s an absolute, complete, and total lie,” Wade informs them both. He rests his elbow on the back of the booth and molds himself a little into the spot between the wall and the cushion. It’s the perfect place to observe his friends—competitors, he amends, because truth or dare is a game of wit and cunning and they are now absolutely his competition—and catch glimpses of the rest of the bar. The guys are still cheering along with their team (Wade knows nothing about basketball), the girls keep tittering and twittering and other gerunds with a lot of Ts, and their waiter—_ _

__Their waiter notices Wade scanning the room, drops a tray off at the bar, and starts weaving his way toward their table._ _

__“Flirt with Mike,” Wade decides._ _

__“Who?” Bobby asks. His voice sounds hoarse, like maybe he inhaled a lot more than just half a mouthful of beer._ _

__“The waiter,” Nate provides._ _

__“Oh, you have _got_ to be—”_ _

__“Looks like you boys are still thirsty,” Mike observes as he sidles up to the table, complete with a little hip action that reminds Wade of how Clint dances once you force a couple drinks in him. Mike’s incredibly pretty—tall and lanky, with dark hair and fine features—and he plants his hands on his hips as he surveys the scene. “Another electric lemonade?”_ _

__“Let me just get a beer,” Wade replies, because he’d like to be alert and aware for the epic amazingness that is Nate Summers attempting to flirt with an actual living human being._ _

__Mike hums in approval, and again when Bobby swears that he’s fine with the remaining half-beer that he hasn’t tried to kill himself with. He grins, warm and friendly as anything, and turns to Nate last._ _

__“And do we want another margarita, or are we switching over like your friend there?”_ _

__For the first half-second after he asks, Wade almost thinks Nate’s lost his nerve, because the other man hardly moves. His big fingers are pressed to his glass, and beads of condensation slip off his skin as he draws them back to tap a little meaningless rhythm against it. Wade wishes he would’ve set limitations for failure to perform—you know, forced Nate to buy all their drinks or something—but again, only for that first half-second._ _

__Because then, Nate raises his chin a half-inch and stops tapping on his glass to really, truly look at their pretty boy waiter. Wade’s not sure whether it’s an initial survey kind of thing—a chance to see what he’s working with, maybe—or _what_ , but whatever it is, there’s something sort of intense about it. Nate defaults to intense, sure, but this feels different._ _

__Different enough that Wade reaches for his water, because his throat feels dry. He’s not even the center of the attention, dammit._ _

__Mike, on the other hand, just rolls his lips together. Like he’s nervous, maybe? Anticipating? He’s definitely not trying to be sexy, not yet, but it looks like it might be the gateway drug toward sexy._ _

__Nate leans back a little against the vinyl, angling his body away from Wade and toward the object of his intensity. He even plants his elbow on the back of the booth and lets his arm dangle close to where the waiter’s standing. Nate just happens to possess the most amazing arms on the planet, for the record. Wade almost hates that he’s missing out on those arms, but he’s got a full view of Nate’s wide shoulders and, uh, that’s not half bad either._ _

__He thinks maybe he picked the worst dare on the planet._ _

__“I think,” Nate muses after entirely too much long, heated eye contact, “that I might be interested in something that’s not available on the menu.”_ _

__Bobby, for all his usual decorum, spills water down the front of his shirt._ _

__Not that anyone besides Wade really notices, because Mike’s shifting his weight around. One hip tilts in Nate’s direction, almost an invitation, and he’s dangerously close to rubbing up against the back of Nate’s hand like a cat who wants petted. The motion catches Nate’s attention, too._ _

__Wade can only really see half of Nate’s face, but he catches a momentary spark of something like heat in his eyes. The heat and the eyes both travel, all the way down Mike’s slender frame and up again, and Wade—_ _

__Wade shifts around in his seat. Just to make sure Nate’s living up to the flirtatious dare, not because he wants to watch this whole thing a little more closely._ _

__He also wants an excuse to avoid Bobby’s gaze, because he’s pretty sure Bobby’s shooting him one of his half-puzzled, half-judgy looks._ _

__Mike’s face, apparently not used to the full force of Nate Summer’s unwavering attention, flushes as red as his converse sneakers. “What, uh, kind of drink are you looking for?” he asks. He sounds halfway to tongue-tied._ _

__“Something—surprising,” Nate says, complete with the totally fake pause. It’s meant to sound distracted, Wade suspects, but mostly, it sounds like an excuse to fumble around for the totally perfect word choice. Mike’s fingers flex where he’s still holding onto his own hips, a little white-knuckled and uncertain, and Nate leans in closer. Wade decides that the only word in the whole of the English language for the darkness in Nate’s eyes—hungry, needy, blazing _darkness_ —is “smoldering.” It is a smoldering darkness, and Wade wonders how Mike can breathe under that gaze._ _

__Maybe he can’t._ _

__It’d explain the white knuckles and everything._ _

__Nate, however, pushes on. “I’d like it sharp, daring, but with a smooth finish,” he continues, then raises his eyebrows in one smooth swoop. “I don’t suppose you’d have any suggestions.”_ _

__Mike rolls his weight onto the balls of his feet like maybe he’s considering the question with the whole of his body’s physical and mental resources. Across the table, Bobby grips his glass so hard that Wade worries he might crack it in half._ _

__And then—no kidding here, folks, because Wade would never joke about shit like this—Nathan Middle-Name-Unknown Summers wets his fucking lips._ _

__The gesture is, without a single shred of reasonable doubt, the filthiest fucking thing Wade himself has ever seen, and he only really catches the tail end of it. Mike, apparently not ready for that swipe of pink against pink, wet and wide and tantalizing, sputters out noises that aren’t actually words. “I, uh, I can check with the bartender, I guess,” he manages after several seconds of groping blindly for actual syllables of a recognized language._ _

__Nate smiles serenely. Somewhere, a religion spontaneously springs up based solely on the sweet innocence of Nate’s slow-burn smile. “I look forward to it,” he replies, low and almost-tender. Mike nods, turns away, remembers that he’s meant to pick up a bunch of empty glasses, and then _actually_ gets the hell out of dodge._ _

__Halfway through the sea of high-top tables, he glances over his shoulder to find Nate watching his ass in his tight, tight jeans. Not normal-watching, either, but hungrily watching. Wade’s pretty sure no one in his life ever watched his ass with that intensity._ _

__Or watched any part of him, for that matter._ _

__That last eager look, combined with Mike’s fire-engine red full-body blush and speed-duck behind the bar, overwhelms Bobby, and he bursts out laughing. It’s loud and free, about as open as Bobby ever is in public—because on his own, he’s great, but otherwise he’s all manners and proper behavior (and unwilling to play truth or dare in a Chili’s, lest you forgot). He smacks the table a couple times, then grabs his beer._ _

__“Is there a winner at truth or dare?” he asks, proving that he’s simultaneously twenty-five and _eighty_. “Because you just won.”_ _

__Nate smirks, self-satisfied, and leans back in the booth. He hooks his other elbow over the top of the vinyl, typical alpha-male behavior, and puffs out his chest a little. Wade thinks it’s for show, but he’s not sure. He’s also not asking._ _

__And he’s definitely, certainly, and absolutely not thinking about the smoldering darkness of Nate Summer’s hungry sex looks._ _

__“You can actually flirt,” he finally says, half-dumbly, because he’s way past the time where laughter’d work in context, and he’s not sure he can fake it._ _

__Nate tips his head in Wade’s direction. His expression softens when their eyes meet, more amused than smug, and Wade feels something swimming around in his gut. He wishes he’d chosen the “flirt with the waiter” dare for _after_ their refills, because he wants to wash down that jumpy, fluttering feeling with something cold._ _

__Preferably an entire metric ton of ice._ _

__“I am a human being, you know,” Nate replies, lifting those ridiculous shoulders of his in a shrug._ _

__“Maybe,” Wade acknowledges, and they only break eye contact when an entirely new waiter—a girl, this time—brings over their drinks._ _

__

__==_ _

__

__They play their game until they are very politely asked to leave so the restaurant can close down for the night, tripping through dozens of conversations and harmless, sedentary dares until they’re red in the face from laughing (and sore in the throat from talking, depending). Bobby tries a couple times to avoid responsibility for his turn, and ends up—once the beer’s flowed a little more freely and the conversation’s slid from rational and adult to seriously crazy—with his forehead pressed to the table’s tile insert. “We’re adults,” he moans._ _

__“No,” Wade returns, holding up his drink. It’s an electric lemonade, again. He’s not entirely sure when he surrendered himself back to its sweet blue embrace, but he grins about it. “Like the band lowercase-fun-period says, we are _young_.”_ _

__“I think they also encourage young men to throw stones at girl’s windows,” Nate notes. The smooth-but-daring-whatever-whatever drink selected by Mike the waiter involves blackberries and smells like heaven. Or at least, it leaves the chaser of berries and sugar on Nate’s breath, and the stain of pink on his lips when he smiles. “Might not be the best role models.”_ _

__“You’re both spoilsports,” Wade decides, and then swigs his drink while he tries to remember whose turn it is._ _

__They swap secrets (Wade’s first actual kiss: seventh grade, Tommy Cooper, tent during Boy Scout camp, skirted the edges of frottage) but also fears (Bobby isn’t sure he’s ready for the “baby shopping” part of his big gay marriage); bawdy stories (Nate once got arrested for streaking) and bad choices (Bobby landed in boarding school after an incident at public school involving seven hundred goldfish); and, at the end of all of it, Wade drinks an entire cup of extra-spicy salsa and nearly throws up._ _

__Nearly._ _

__Incidentally, their non-Mike waitress asks them to leave about five minutes after Wade announces, “I can breathe fire!” Weird coincidence, right?_ _

__They trip out into the cold of the January night together, all of them sober enough to walk in straight lines but way too stupid to try driving home. Bobby, apparently prepared like the stupid Boy Scout he is—actual Boy Scout, not “make out in a tent and get booted off the troop” Boy Scout like Wade used to be—waves at an idling car, and it swings up to the curve._ _

__The man who steps out is very tall, very attractive, and very blond. He’s also probably rich, because he wears one of the nicest coats Wade’s ever seen, and Wade hangs out with lawyers. Well, state-funded lawyers, but lawyers all the same. “You owe me,” he chides._ _

__Bobby wobbles a little as he tugs the door open but rolls his eyes with the grace of a, well, professional eye-roller. The grace of Phil Coulson or Maria Hill, then. “And how many clubs have Hank or I picked you up from?” he demands._ _

__The indignation is reduced slightly by the belch that follows. “If your entourage throws up on the upholstery, you’re paying for it,” Rich Blond notes before sliding into the driver’s seat. Bobby sneers a mimicking face at him, then half-climbs, half-falls into the back seat._ _

__“He’s the world’s least-graceful half-drunk,” Wade notes aloud, and reaches for the door. He intends to step out of the way, let Nate—taller and broader than him and Bobby combined, thanks—tug open the front passenger’s side, but Nate just stands there on the sidewalk. He’s all bundled up in his coat and scarf, like somebody out of a winter Gap commercial, and his eyes are sort of shadowed from the Chili’s overhang._ _

__“I’ll call a cab,” he says._ _

__“Uh, Bobby snagged us a free ride,” Wade points out. He even sort of gestures at the car, in case Nate missed it. He realizes for a second that it’s a really _nice_ car, the kind that probably includes a luxury package and brand-name stereo equipment, but he forgets about that the longer he peers at Nate. _ _

__Inside the restaurant, he’d looked all red-cheeked and jolly, but now, he looks cold. Not physically cold, but emotionally. Wade wants to find where he hides the human-to-android switch, break it off, and trample it._ _

__“C’mon, guys!” Bobby shouts from within the car._ _

__Nate waves a hand. “Go,” he says._ _

__And because Wade literally cannot think of any better reaction (thanks, alcohol!), he rolls his eyes. “You’re so weird,” he says. When Nate’s lips tip up into a small semblance of a smile, he jabs him in the chest with his index finger. “Not a compliment,” he adds._ _

__“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Nate retorts, and nudges Wade toward the door._ _

__Rich Blond is named Warren and apparently as wealthy as he looks, not that Wade bothers to ask. No, Wade rides in silence while Bobby and his friend bicker about who owes who more favors and why. He thinks a couple times about mentioning Nate, but he’s not sure what to say about it._ _

__When he digs out his phone, just to kill the time, there’s a text message waiting for him._ _

__**Darcy:** _can’t wait to see you tomorrow__ _

__The timestamp on the message reads just after seven. You know, five hours ago._ _

__Wade stares at it for a long time, then shoves his phone back into his pocket and stares out the window the rest of the way home._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, dear readers, here’s the deal: the bar exam is Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. My original plan was to lift the biweekly schedule after the bar and post weekly for the rest of the story. But.
> 
> It turns out that after the test, I am visiting my parents in Chicago, moving apartments, and starting work in very rapid succession. Like, all these things will happen before Labor Day. Therefore, I’m going to probably need to keep this one biweekly for the remainder of the story—or at least until after I’ve moved and settled into a routine at work.
> 
> I want to thank all of you for being patient and supportive of me during my bar prep season. Here’s to hoping your faith is well-placed!


	7. February Showers Bring, Well, Something

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade descends into one of the circles of hell, and discusses what it’s like to keep up with the Joneses. Oh, and there are feelings, but who wants to talk about _those_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to Jen and saranoh, who tolerated my bar-related insanity, who always make my words better, and who are just awesome gals to have around.

“I’m not actually staying,” Bruce Banner notes, and holds out his hands.

You ever heard of the nine circles of hell? No? Okay, well, they’re from a book Wade read way back in undergrad, and he can’t remember the names of them or what exact horrors await in each, but he knows this for sure: attending a baby shower while nursing a catastrophic hangover is definitely one of those circles. By the time Bruce shows up with his little mint-green gift bag and his surly-looking preteen lagging behind (Wade understands and will fist-bump it out with him later), Wade’s on his third mimosa. 

Mimosas, by the way, are the world’s worst hair-of-the-dog.

He’s also pretty sure Maria’s watering them down. Juicing them down? Whatever, the point is, everything hurts.

Jane rushes over, gushing all over Bruce and hugging him fully even though Wade’s attempt to hug him (in male solidarity, he swears) was blocked by raised hands and shuffly-footed avoidance tactics. Wade tries very hard not to be a little jealous about that.

“We’re running errands,” Bruce explains once he loses the armful of pregnant trial assistant. From a half-step behind him, Miles eyes the table full of classy snacks with hungry kid-greed. Wade so cannot blame him for that. “I wanted to run this over now, rather than later.”

Jane frowns. Wade hardly knows her—she’s little, she’s smart, she’s Darcy’s bestie, what else is there to know?—but he can tell that frown’s dangerous. “You sure you don’t want to stay?”

Bruce’s lips twitch up into a sorry little frown. Wade’s never seen him frown so ruefully before. More proof that a Jane frown’s a recipe for certain death. “Tony would have a field day,” he says, shaking his head slightly. “I’d rather not encourage him to call me the ‘little woman’ any more often than he already does.”

“He’s totally the girl,” Wade notes. Hey, he’s close enough to join in on the conversation, so why not?

“Totally,” Miles agrees. Mega ninja points to the kid, too, because when Wade and his dad both twist around to find him, he’s already at the snack table. At the table with a cup of punch, actually. And a plate of fruit salad.

Bruce narrows his eyes. Miles nabs a couple bite-sized quiches and stuffs them into his mouth. 

Yeah, Wade likes this kid.

“We really can’t stay,” Bruce stresses in that parental tone that usually just means _stop what you’re doing right now or so help me_. 

Apparently, though, his kid’s not been _his_ long enough to understand the whole vocal inflection thing, because he rolls his eyes. “What he means,” he offers to just about everybody once he’s wiped strawberry off his mouth with the back of his hand, “is that he’s dropping me off at Ganke’s and then going back home with Tony.”

“What I mean is that we can’t stay,” Bruce says again, but based on body language alone, the kid is absolutely, totally, a hundred percent onto his parents’ filthy, filthy habits.

Jane sends her boss a look that proves once and for all how somebody so teeny-tiny and mild-mannered keeps Thor Odinson in line all the damn time. “You’ll stay long enough for me to open your gift,” she declares, then loops her arm in Bruce’s and physically drags him toward the couch.

No joke. Physically drags a guy who fills out those wrinkled button-downs he wears all the time.

Impressive.

In Jane’s defense—or maybe Darcy’s, since it feels more like Darcy deserves the defense after running herself crazy ragged for the last couple weeks—the baby shower’s not all that bad if you’re, you know, into all that. There’s food and decorations and mimosas, there’re stupid games printed off the internet waiting to be played, and there are women. There are over a dozen women, lawyer-women and mother-in-law women and old college friends with names like Katie, Jenny, and Crystal. Good, “I grew up in the 90s” names that were probably coupled with last initials until a year or two ago.

The problem is that, well, everybody’s female. Mrs. Odinson—“Call me Frigga,” she’d said pleasantly, but _yeah_ , not gonna happen—and all the friends and colleagues, they’re all girls and they know girl stuff. Half an hour in, and Wade’s heard more talk about lady parts than when he used to stop by frat parties in college. That’s pretty bad.

Especially since it’s not even sexy conversation. Like right now, for instance, he slips past where Peggy and a couple of Jane’s friends are laughing uproariously, and he swears to god he hears the word _mucus_. Dropped into casual conversation like that.

No. Nope. All aboard the “not in this lifetime” train, because he literally can _not_ —

“We were at Target for, like, an hour picking out that stupid present,” Miles Morales’s complaining to Darcy by the time Wade sidles up to them at the snack table. He slings his non-mimosa arm around Darcy for a stupid half-second half-hug, but Darcy sort of leans into it. Maybe it’s the hangover talking, but she’s seemed extra-grateful to have him around in the last half-hour. Actually, no, maybe that’s the baby shower talking more than last night’s poor choices. 

Miles stops talking to stare for a second. Darcy levels him a look best categorized as _death by chocolate doe-eyes_. “You were at Target?” she prompts.

“You have a boyfriend?” Miles responds, totally failing the prompt-and-answer structure of the conversation.

“You just totally failed the prompt-and-answer structure of the conversation,” Wade notes, but Darcy answers, “Boy-space-friend,” at the same time, and everything gets a little muddled. Especially since Wade sort of grins, Darcy _absolutely_ grins, and Miles looks at both of them like he might’ve never seen two adults genuinely enjoy one another’s company before.

Wade blames his upbringing. Well, the recent upbringing. The crazy-Stark and rage-against-the-machine-Banner upbringing.

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” Miles presses, because apparently, one decent answer to the question is about eighteen decent answers too few.

Darcy rolls her eyes. “Listen,” she says, and slips out of Wade’s grasp to crowd the kid’s personal space. One hand, complete with pink polka-dot fingernails, lands on his slender shoulder; Miles looks momentarily shocked that an attractive adult woman is voluntarily touching him. He’s going to love puberty, Wade just knows it. “When a guy and a girl are kind of into each other, sometimes, they start hanging out. Dinners, drinks, eventually whole days together, and then they—”

“Okay, no,” Miles interrupts. He jerks out of Darcy’s reach and rounds the end of the snack table. Like he’s wisely staying as far out of her clutches as possible, which is smart given the blistering evil caught on the corners of her lips. “I live with Tony and Bruce. I know what happens when people are into each other.”

“They’re men,” Darcy points out.

“Manly men,” Wade joins in, because he can clearly see where she’s taking this and it’s about the greatest conversation in the history of the earth. 

“So it’s different when it’s a—”

“ _Ew_ ,” Miles declares. He abandons his paper plate of stolen treats, sticks up his hands, and steps completely away from the table. A couple of the women in attendance—Natasha, one of Jane’s college buddies, and Frigga—stop talking to stare at the boy who’s busily disavowing all knowledge of the birds and the bees. “Stop talking now.”

Across the room on the couch, Bruce asks, “Is something wrong?” Jane’s cooing stupidly over some little baby outfit that the kid’ll probably only use for a week or two before it grows too big. Worse, Wade’s pretty sure there are like four or five more baby outfits in the same bag, all worth cooing over. God, if that’s what tiny clothes and socks do to women, he is literally never producing any red-headed babies with anyone _ever_. 

For a second, Miles looks like maybe he’s been caught stealing cookies before dinner (that’s a thing kids can do to get in trouble, right?) or lifting a fifty from Stark’s wallet (definitely a thing _that_ kid could pull off), all wide-eyed and panicky. Then, he shakes his head, grabs his plate, and retreats to the couch.

Darcy, because she’s freaking awesome, laughs her ass off. “When he gets all teenage and too-cool, he’s going to suck,” she decides.

“Yeah, but by then he’ll also realize just how feminine your wiles are, and you can probably distract him with— Ow!” Darcy grinds her fist into his arm where she slugged him, just for good measure, and Wade’s forced to hip-bump her away. “The domestic violence attorney’s here, you know. Watching you. Documenting this for when I press charges, so she can throw you in the big house and conveniently lose the key—”

“No jury of my peers would ever convict me,” Darcy interrupts. She leans up, kisses him on the corner of the mouth—just like that, in front of god, everyone, and worst of all, Thor’s mother—and then wanders over to check on Jane and adorable baby outfit number three.

Wade, like a champ, just stands there.

He tries to mask how awkward he feels about the whole thing, of course, picking at his mimosa glass with a fingernail and sort of wandering a loop of the living room, but hiding the rising ball of weird, out-of-place dread is surprisingly difficult. He’d assumed at least Thor’d show up for a little while, booming and loud but _male_. Instead, Thor’d stuck around long enough to kiss his mother on the cheek and his fiancée on the lips before disappearing with his creepy greasy-haired brother.

Seriously, Loki looks like a comic book villain. Nobody but Wade ever seems to notice that one.

He drifts in and out of conversations while Darcy and Jane chat with Bruce, not so much participating as listening in like a grade-A professional creeper. Jennifer the First—blonde, lots of hip, too much lipstick—is snarking with Crystal—tall, ginger, intimidatingly serious—about some coworker she hates, and their laughter shrills through the room. Peggy, Natasha, Pepper, and Maria discuss something serious and never cast him a second glance (not that he blames them), and Frigga—

“Oh, Wade, come over here,” Frigga Odinson calls, and Wade freezes like he’s just dropped through the ice into the deepest lake on some other, non-Earth planet. One very, very far from its sun, where heat never finds the water, and oh god, she’s waving at him.

He tosses back the rest of his drink in one hungry gulp and abandons his cup to wander over. The mother-in-law of the hour is standing with friends Katie-with-an-E, Katy-with-a-Y, and Jennifer the Second, all of whom are pretty decent-looking and seem, you know, reasonable. Which is why Wade walks over, for the record: presumed reasonableness.

He figures out all of a half-second later than presuming reasonableness is the world’s most monumental mistake.

“So, _you_ are Darcy’s mysterious boyfriend,” Katie-with-an-E says, and immediately plants her hands on her hips. Her clothes teeter on the border between Sunday best and Saturday night worst, and Wade’s momentarily distracted by the lacy bits of either camisole or bra that pop out from under her sweater. “We were wondering if maybe you were fictional.”

“Mmm, less ‘wondering,’ more ‘totally sure,’” Katy-with-a-Y appends.

“Girls,” Frigga says. She sounds actually kind of annoyed by the tone of the conversation, and when the dueling Katherine-derivatives both look in her direction, her brow tightens. “I thought you wanted to meet him, not dissect him like a laboratory experiment.”

Because he learned manners at some point as a child, Wade jumps right into the conversation and asks, “Oh, are you guys sciency-geniuses like Jane, too?”

All three of them, Jennifer the Second included, stare at him like he’d just announced an exciting career as Bon Jovi’s body double. “No,” Jennifer answers quickly. She’s slight and brown—it’s not offensive to say brown, is it? That’s not an –ism on its own, right?—but still stares at him grinding him under her heel might not be a big deal. “I’m in marketing, Katie’s a pharmaceutical rep, and Katy . . . ”

Katy rolls her eyes. “You don’t have to pause before you say ‘actuarial accounting’ like it’s a curse, you know.”

“Except it is,” Jennifer returns, and they all laugh in that really weird way reserved for unfunny jokes and awkward social situations.

Frigga’s eyes narrow again, so perfectly annoyed that Wade wants to kiss her right on the mouth and maybe propose they run away together, but then Jane calls her over to look at something. She excuses herself, perfectly polite and pleasant, and leaves Wade to the wolves.

Seriously. He swears to god, they even bare their teeth and shit.

“Okay, so, really,” Katie says once Frigga’s out of earshot. She leaves one hand on her hip and gestures with the other, all loose and lazy. Like she’s not secretly planning to braid his entrails into summer camp-style friendship bracelets, or whatever. “You’re actually dating Darcy?”

“Uh,” Wade answers, because he feels from her tone that he’s misunderstanding the question. He yanks for a second at the collar of his polo shirt—why’d he decided to dress up in a polo and khakis like an off-duty police officer?—and shifts his wait a little. “We’re seeing each other, yeah.”

“Really,” Katy deadpans.

“Unless something changed from, like, three minutes ago, where she kissed me by the snack table, I—”

“You know she’s actually crazy, right?” Jennifer interrupts. There’s a weird _tsk_ in her voice, a lip-smack like she’s scolding a little kid. She crosses her arms under her not-insignificant, uhm, feminine wiles, and proceeds to stare him down. He feels like he’s playing chicken with the biggest, baddest, most terrifying semi-truck on the expressway, even if she is only five feet tall. “No offense to you, because you seem like you might be smart—”

“And you’re kind of hot,” Katie adds. Wade’s not sure it’s a compliment.

“—but you need to come to grips with the fact that that girl, over there? She is a whole ball of hot mess.”

Jennifer wiggles her finger in the air, drawing an invisible circle around Darcy, and Wade stares. Not at Darcy—he’d stared at Darcy when she opened the door and grabbed him in a bone-crunching hug, sure, but he’s sort of used up his Darcy-stare quota for the morning—but at Jennifer, tiny and _mean_ as she is. 

“Darcy,” he repeats.

“Right,” Katy says. She sighs, and the sound is actually sympathetic. He half expects her to pat him on the shoulder. “Look, Wade, she’s smart—”

“Kind of,” Katie mutters.

“—and super nice—”

“Except not,” Jennifer grumbles.

“—but she . . . ” Katy grits her teeth for a moment. Wade really hopes she’s surrendering to the urge to shut up, apologize, and leave him the hell alone. Instead, she shakes her head. “We love Jane,” she finally continues, “but I sometimes don’t know how she and Darcy became friends, or why they still spend any time together.”

Jennifer rolls her eyes. “Uh, desperation, dumbass,” she scolds, and Katy at least looks annoyed by the venom in her evil little henchbuddy’s tone. “Jane’s a freaking fluffball, and all that crazy just keeps on plowing her down. Over, and over, and—”

“Jane,” Wade interrupts, because he’s almost absolutely positive that they’re talking about someone else. They all nod, though. “Jane Foster. That girl. Over there. With her super-spastic boss and his cute little black kid, _she’s_ a fluffball.”

Katie considers this question for a second before shrugging. “Maybe doormat’s the better term,” she decides.

“She’s just too nice to tell Darcy to hit the road,” Katy agrees. At least her nod appears sad, like maybe she’s capable of human emotion. The other two, Wade thinks, are probably card-carrying sociopaths, the kind of animal-torturing weirdos that make Hannibal Lecter look well-adjusted and kind of—

“Here’s a question,” a voice says suddenly, and Wade almost leaps right out of his khakis when Natasha Romanoff— _the_ Natasha Romanoff, ladies and gentlemen, all curvy and ginger and absolutely a sight for any eyes, sore or otherwise—puts a hand on his shoulder. He thinks he maybe even pees a little. “What do you know about alternative means defense pleadings?”

Wade opens his mouth to answer, but the only sound that escapes is a strangled, bastardized form of the word, “What?” Because first, Natasha Romanoff is talking to him, voluntarily, in a social setting.

And second, alternative means defense pleadings, unless Wade’s missed something in his time as a defense attorney, are not in fact things that exist.

“Alternative means defense pleadings,” Natasha says again, and meets his eyes. There’s something there, serious and tight, and he rolls his lips together. Peggy, Maria, and Pepper still all stand in a clump over by Maria’s makeshift mimosa bar, chatting, but he swears they keep glancing in his directions. “There’s a case coming up on appeal, Maria thought you might know something about it.”

And Wade’d faint from the suggestion that Maria Hill finds him competent if he weren’t still completely sure he’s missing something. “I think I’d need the details on the case before I could just start rattling off the law or whatever,” he says dumbly, because what else’s a guy supposed to say about totally fictional pleadings in a conversation that literally makes exactly no sense?

“Then come over here, let’s—” Natasha starts to say, but then she pauses. It’s like in a movie, you know, right before Angelina Jolie shoots the bad guy right in the head, because her body turns toward Jane’s three evil stooges muscle by muscle. Her hips rotate, then her shoulders, then her head, and her curls bounce as she peers at them.

Katie and Katy are both taller than her, but you’d never guess it by the way she sends them the most dismissive looks in the universe. Jennifer squares her shoulders like she’s expecting a slap.

“You wouldn’t mind if I borrowed him, right?” Natasha asks. Her tone suggests that minding won’t amount for a hill of beans in this crazy world, or whatever the saying is.

Jennifer flashes them the world’s tightest smile. “It’s fine,” she replies.

“Oh, good,” Natasha returns, smiles just as tightly, and then physically drags Wade away from the conversation.

Wade seriously considers kissing her full on the mouth, in front of both of their respective girlfriends, because she’s amazing and deserves at least a little tongue.

“You’re amazing and deserve at least a little tongue,” he blurts once Natasha half-guides, half-shoves him into her little group of women. He realizes for a second how weird it is, Maria and Pepper and everybody in jeans and normal shirts, looking relaxed and human instead of like lean, mean, justice-producing machines. He kind of loves it. “But, uh, you know alternative means defense pleadings aren’t really a—”

“We were trying to get you out of there,” Maria interrupts. Whatever she’s drinking, it is amber, served on ice, and definitely not a mimosa.

“You looked like you might wet yourself,” Peggy adds, complete with a little tip of her own glass. Like a tip of a hat, except then she swigs mimosa like a frat boy. Wade really likes Peggy.

“So, uh, they were actually awful?” The four of them all stare at him, sort of blank-faced. He thinks maybe all those years of moving around as a kid stunted his social development or something, because he’s definitely missing important information at this point. “That whole interrogation and criticism routine, that wasn’t just scary to me? That was, like, objectively, reasonable-person scary?”

Natasha sighs softly and shakes her head as Maria reaches for her little drink station. Wade opens his mouth to turn down another mimosa—seriously, he’s got orange juice reflux at this point, not sexy—but Maria reaches beyond the juice and champagne to pull out a bottle of Jack Daniels. He’s not joking. Actual, real-life, in the-flesh Jack Daniels, and she dumps him two fingers of it in a plastic cup.

He might love her a little.

“I thought Clint was joking when he said you have a lot to learn about women,” Pepper remarks, and thank god Wade needs this stiff drink more than he’s ever needed anything in his entire life (including ball cancer surgery), because otherwise, he might kind of sputter at that. “Turns out, he was actually right.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Peggy notes.

Wade looks between the four of them—his rescuers, his _heroes_ , his big damn solution to the little catty problems known as Katie, Katy, and Jennifer—and grins. “That mean you all are going to teach me?” he asks.

“No,” they agree, together, in unison, and Wade grins.

 

==

 

“Oh, _no_ ,” Darcy says when they finally break away for breath, their panting turning to crystals on the cold air and drifting away, “I hate those girls. I hate them more than I’ve ever hated anything, and I would literally light them on fire if I could.”

Having officially survived his first-ever baby shower and lived to make out after it—erm, lived to tell the tale, whatever—Wade can say with absolute and complete certainty that baby showers are hell on earth. He’d tried his best to smile politely during the present-opening, to munch on his little sandwiches and assorted side salads, and to play along with the stupid games, but every minute felt like an hour. Or two hours, or five, depending on how hard Jennifer the Second glared in his direction.

(Spoiler alert: she glared very, _very_ hard almost the whole damn time.)

But worst of all, in a way, was Darcy. Darcy, his super-smart, super-sexy, super-ridiculous girl-space-friend who, for the whole late morning and early afternoon, acted like the main character from a Nicholas Sparks novel-turned-movie. She’d hung from his arm, she’d leaned against him on the couch, she’d kissed his cheek and called him “babe” and—

Wade liked her. Likes her, present tense, whatever.

But she’d acted like a freaking pod person, even threw out his lunch plate for him and everything, and Wade’d seriously felt his skin crawl like in a horror movie, because _no_. No, nope, not the Darcy he knew and purposely asked out, and definitely not her best possible self.

He’d asked about the stupid girls right before Darcy’d backed him against his Geo Metro and kissed him, her lips hot and her tongue orange-flavored, but— Well. Kissing.

They stare at each other in the low-light of the winter afternoon, Darcy’s hair all mussed up from him threading his fingers through it while strands of dying conversations drift out from behind the closed storm door.

“You hate them,” he echoes, because either this round of making out was, like, especially good, or he’s heard her wrong.

Darcy sighs, tosses a half-second glance over her shoulder at the front door of the Odinson residence, and then moves over to flop back against the side of the car. The whole thing shakes, because it’s tiny and beat all to hell and back, but it’s sort of the perfect height for her to rest her head against. The street Jane and Thor live on is super-quiet—it used to just be, like, canneries or something like that back in the day, and now is being slowly and steadily gentrified by hulking-huge Scandinavian do-it-yourselfers—and Wade swears he can hear the wheels in Darcy’s head turning.

“You ever have those friends who, even though they’re awful human beings, you can’t seem to tell them to fuck themselves?” 

“No,” Wade says immediately. She tips her head up so she can look at him properly, and he shrugs. “Why would anybody keep a friend around if they’re a jackass? I mean, I’m not a dictionary or anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of what a friend’s supposed to be.”

She nods a little, but slumps back against his car. He wonders for a second what it’s like to be in her head. Actually, he mostly wonders what it’s like to be _her_ , three people all at once; she’s the trial assistant, sure, but also the doting best friend and the intrepid law student, and Wade’s pretty sure that’s a lot of hats for one girl to balance. “Jane came all the way out here for college,” she finally replies. “No friends, no family, nothing to pin her down here. We met the Katies and the Jens in our freshman dorm, and I don’t know. Loyalty took over.”

Wade glances down at her. “You ever think maybe Jane’s got a loyalty kink?” 

Darcy breaks into a ridiculous grin, even if it only lasts for a couple seconds. “Her and Thor _both_ ,” she stresses, one hand flopping in the winter air. “You get a couple drinks in him sometime and start asking about Loki, because let me tell you: the way that asshole treated the family, he should be buried in some Wisconsin wheat field right now, not taking Thor out for ‘you’re having a baby’ drinks.”

He considers the whole arrangement of drunk Scandinavians at three in the afternoon before he asks, “Does Wisconsin even have wheat fields?”

“You know what I mean,” she retorts, and elbows him soundly in the ribs when he laughs.

They stand there for a couple long minutes, after that, watching as some of the others trail out of the house and into the February chill. Natasha nods at him just once, almost imperceptible, and he nods back as he watches her touch her hand to Pepper’s elbow and murmur something as they walk away; a couple steps behind, Peggy chats pleasantly with Crystal while the Jens and the Katies all half-talk, half-argue with one another. Wade wonders how the care and feeding of girl children really works, because he’s pretty sure being snippy and unpleasant isn’t biological. 

When they’ve all dispersed, Darcy looks up at him again. “I’m not actually not much better than them, you know,” she admits.

He frowns. “Uh, on what planet?” he retorts, and she sort of half-rolls her pretty brown doe eyes. “I mean, ‘cause only one category of girl tried to back me into a corner and make me cry, and I don’t think you fit into that genre, so—”

“Shut up and let me apologize for ten seconds.” Wade buttons his lips and, just for effect, mimics turning a tiny mouth-key in a tiny mouth-lock. Darcy snorts at him and pushes herself away from the car, but then she stays quiet. Still and quiet, actually, like the calm before the proverbial storm. 

Not that he’d ever call her a storm to her face, of course.

“I know I spooked you with the touching and the kissing and the ‘babe’ thing,” she finally continues. He starts to open his mouth in protest, but she raises an eyebrow. He presses his mouth into the tightest line he can manage, which hurts a little. “But Peggy told me the shit they were pulling with you, like we were all eighteen and crushing on the same guy again, and I wanted to give them the big middle finger.”

“You could’ve just given them the actual finger,” Wade points out. At least there’s no eyebrow-raise and nasty look, this time. “Maybe the dual-handed action. Hell, I’m an old pro at flipping the bird, I could’ve helped.”

“And you think that would’ve worked on them?” 

“I think,” he begins, but actually, no. No, he knows for a fact Darcy is right, and there’s no returning from that knowledge.

Instead, he reaches forward and snags her by the hem of her sweater, and sort of pulls her back into his grip. He plans on kissing her, maybe pressing her against the car this time around, but her face— Something’s not right in the way she looks at him, you know? Something’s timid and less confident than he’s used to, disappointed and a little _sorry_.

He wishes for telepathy.

He also wishes he knew better how to be better at all this.

Therefore, there’s no kissing, just hands on her hips and his eyes travelling over her face. “Would you believe me if I said you didn’t freak me out?” 

The expression that follows the question is best described as _bitch, please_. “You dropped your sandwich in your lap when I called you ‘babe,’” she reminds him.

“Okay, well, point,” he acknowledges, and Darcy laughs before kissing him goodbye.

 

==

 

After that, he never sees Darcy again.

Okay, no, that’s a lie, but he definitely doesn’t see her for the rest of the week, right up to and including Friday afternoon. He’s used to missing her a little—they’re busy people, he’s swamped with work, she’s bogged down with school—but he’s not exactly prepared to walk into the district attorney’s office for his Friday afternoon meeting with Natasha and see an empty, Darcy-less cubicle in the middle of the floor.

He stares at it, actually. Stupidly, helplessly, dumbly gapes like he’s never seen an abandoned chair in his entire life.

“She’s got a project,” someone informs him, and he twists around in time to see Bucky walk up and dump a pile of folders on Darcy’s clean desk. Well, mostly-clean. Maybe “clean for Darcy” is the best way of putting it, actually. He’s ditched the suit coat and his hair’s sort of mussed up, leaving Wade with the distinct impression that maybe he participated in some afternoon office hanky-panky with his better half. 

Wade wonders who calls the shots in that scenario.

He’s apparently extra blank-faced while he thinks about it, though, because Bucky presses, “You know, at school? I guess it’s a paper for her privacy class. She’s a little freaked out about it.” He shrugs and rests his hands on his hips. “I mean, bonus points: she’ll probably be really glad for the stress relief later.”

You ever watch a YouTube video of a water balloon or something else exploding? Yeah, Wade feels that way right then, but with blushing and all over his face. Like, up his cheeks and his neck and everywhere, because Bucky Barnes, assistant district attorney, just made a sex joke. Worse, when Wade hesitates to respond to it, he laughs. “Maybe she’s not the one who needs the relief,” he decides, and then steers Wade toward Natasha’s office for their pretrial meeting.

When Wade relays the whole thing to Nate later that night, Nate—

“I hate you,” Wade declares, and throws a crumpled-up ball of paper at his stupid laughing white-haired head.

Nate leans out of the way and lets the paper harmlessly impact the wall behind him, ending in the least-satisfying act of violence _ever_. Wade slumps back in his chair and pulls his laptop more fully onto his lap, but he’s glaring. At the forms, not at Nate, because multitasking is hard. “I’m sorry,” Nate replies. In no way does he actually sound even a tiny bit sorry. “I just can’t imagine someone catching that mouth of yours off guard.”

“Yeah, well, I— Wait, what?”

Nate sighs, this long release of breath, and shakes his head. They’re crowded into his office again, with the dual monitors and the completely boring wall art, but Wade’d dragged one of the comfy chairs out of Bobby’s office and is now tucked up in it, laptop on his knees. Nate’s relaxed in his leather rolling chair, his sleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned. Wade thinks, totally not for the first time, that he needs someone to muss up his hair. Also, he needs to wear an undershirt with a higher neck, because Wade’s not used to Nate Summers showing skin.

He wonders, super-briefly, whether Mike the waiter from Chili’s got to see some of Nate’s skin.

And then, he forces himself to never think about that again.

“You,” Nate finally says after what feels like an hour, “have the world’s most ridiculous mouth.”

“Yeah, but, I mean, ridiculous _how_?” Nate stares across his desk at him, and Wade groans. He ditches the laptop on the stupid uncomfortable plastic chair he was using as a foot rest and stretches out a little. “Ridiculous in terms of content? Shape? Pouty delights?”

“Pouty delights?” Nate repeats. There’s the tiniest, most delightful hint of amusement in his tones.

“The way I whistle? The way I sneer? My talent for talking so fast that the court reporters need to tell me to slow down?” At least the guy rolls his eyes at that one. “The fact that my lick-shake brings all the boys to the yard?”

And maybe it’s just the week he’s had, you know, with the not-seeing-Darcy, the piles of work, and the trial coming up, but Wade decides now’s a great time to demonstrate his lick-shake. He swipes his tongue along his upper lip first, then his lower one, slow and sultry like something out of a bad porno, the corners of his mouth totally ready to break into a grin when Nate inevitably flips him off.

But Nate fails to flip him off.

No, instead, Nate _watches_.

He watches Wade like Mike the waiter watched _Nate_ , a little uncertain but also kind of hungry, and Wade forgets that words exist. He seriously tries to formulate them, but nothing happens. Instead, he’s left sitting there while Nate stares at his mouth.

Uhm, he thinks.

“Uhm,” he says.

Nate immediately clears his throat and drops his eyes back to the computer monitors. “I meant the content,” he says after a couple seconds, “that comes pouring out of your mouth at inopportune times. And whatnot.”

“Right,” Wade acknowledges, and returns to bug-hunting. In the forms, mind you. Not actual, real bugs, or _Wreck-it-Ralph_ bugs.

The silence that ensues is the most awkward silence ever conceived in the known universe. Trust him, he’s an expert on awkward silences. He picks his way through the stupid forms he’s supposed to proof-read, clicking the “forward” button at the right times and whatever, but he keeps glancing up toward Nate. Nate keeps his head down and his eyes focused straight ahead at his screens, and only really pauses long enough to sip his soda.

Wade knows he should worry about this stupid project for equally-stupid Emma—and if you tell her he just mentally called her stupid, he will hunt you down and murder you once she is finished murdering him—but he can’t totally focus. He feels itchy in the quiet, like he’s waiting for disaster to strike. Like standing in the shadow of the falling anvil, or something equally cartoony.

During minute seventeen of studious silence, his phone buzzes on the corner of Nate’s desk. Nate raises an eyebrow but never stops typing, and Wade snatches the stupid thing off the table. There’s a Facebook alert waiting for him, and he literally groans aloud when he sees the name _Jennifer McMillian_ —or, you know, Jennifer the Second, harbinger of evil and wearer of very short skirts.

“Girl trouble?” Nate asks in a voice and is actually not at all mocking.

“No,” Wade answers too quickly, and tosses his phone onto the empty chair beside him. Nate’s freakishly agile sausage-fingers stop moving for a second, and when Wade brings his head up, it’s because the guy’s staring at him across the office. “Not my girl stuff—not that I have a girl, because she’s not _mine_ , she’s an independent human being who doesn’t need a man to control her—”

“Yes, Merida.”

“—but maybe _a_ girl. A little.” Nate’s eyes never lift, so he shakes his head. That’s the international symbol for _I really don’t want to get into this with you right now_ , right? Because he’s not sure he knows how to use those sea flags to form sentences, and he’s rusty on his sign language, so—

“All right,” Nate replies slowly, and resumes typing.

Wade resumes working, too, really trying to focus on figuring out why none of the child support algorithms actually work—seriously, you can put any number into the form and the child support will calculate into a negative, which even with his limited family law experience Wade’s pretty sure is _not_ supposed to happen. But the more he fiddles and key mashes, the more the friend request from Jennifer the Second circles around him like an evil, fake-friendly poltergeist, and the more he’s reminded of the awkward baby shower from hell.

Which, in his defense, is why he blurts, “Can I ask you something?”

Nate’s fingers pause, but only for a second. “You just did,” he says simply, and then jumps right back into work.

And, you know, blame it on the friend request or the lip weirdness—hell, blame it on the rain in Spain falling mainly on the plain or whatever—but Wade jerks his head up from his laptop so violently that he swears he whiplashes himself. “Did— Did you just dad-reply to me?” he demands. Across the desk, Nate’s lips curve into what just might be a tiny, shitty grin. “You know that’s a total dad move, like the whole _I don’t know, can you_ shit when somebody asks to take a wiz, I don’t—”

“You had a question?” Yeah, he definitely sounds amused, the fuckface.

“Yeah, I did. _Dad_. But I’m not sure I’m going to ask it, now.” Nate grins, all crooked-lipped and smug, and Wade tries again to focus on the forms. But now, instead of fighting only with his dumb brain, he’s fighting with the imprint of Nate’s smile.

You can guess how that one turns out. 

“Have you ever—” he starts, but he stops when he realizes how stupid that sounds. His laptop teeters on his knees, so he picks it up and shoves it onto the corner of the desk. It knocks over his empty paper coffee cup and the little tower of creamer cups he’d assembled earlier, but he ignores it. “Do you ever look at something you’re doing and think to yourself, ‘Hey, maybe keeping up appearances isn’t actually worth it, this time around?’”

For the first time since they started working however long ago, Nate fully stops typing. Not just a pause, but a full on stop, one where he pushes his chair away from the desk and leans back a little. He’s got the same nice, fake leather desk chair as the rest of them, the one with springy resistance when you lean back, and he bounces a bit as he settles. “In general, or in a specific scenario?”

“Mostly general,” Wade replies, but Nate decides to channel their boss and quirk an eyebrow at him. He sighs and scratches his fingers through his hair. “So, I went to this baby shower with Darcy, right?”

“You do realize that baby showers are generally reserved for women,” Nate asks. Well, okay, he doesn’t technically ask it, but the question mark is totally implied.

Or at least implied enough that Wade rolls his eyes. “I told her they were going to pat me down for boobs, but she wouldn’t let me out of it. And, I mean, the food was pretty good.”

“And you lived to tell the tale.”

“And that.” He drops his hands back into his lap, though, and kind of stares at them for a minute. “But, anyway, it was just— There were these frenemies of hers there, and it all turned into this weird pod-person keeping-up-with-the-joneses look-I’ve-got-a-boyfriend _weirdness_.” He shrugs. “It was, I don’t know, weird. Or whatever.”

A little, thoughtful-sounding noise escapes from the back of Nate’s throat, and when Wade glances over at him, the guy’s sort of half-bouncing in his desk chair. He reaches for his soda, sips it, and then holds onto the can. His hands look like maybe they could crush it without any effort whatsoever, but of course, he really only worries his thumbs against it. “And you’ve never pretended to be something you’re not to pretend everything’s all right?”

“I—”

“No, Wade,” Nate presses. There’s something in his voice Wade’s not entirely used to, something softer and more considerate than the average Nate Summers rumble-pack special. “Don’t deflect. Actually think about this: haven’t you done things you wouldn’t otherwise do to convince the people around you that everything’s as it should be? That you’re fine?”

Wade rolls his lips together, because the answer’s _yes_. Of course it’s yes. Every single human being on the fucking planet is forced by their very nature to answer that question _yes_ , because that’s how being a person works. It involves deceit and subterfuge, it requires occasional lies about how decently your life is going, and it practically forces you to sign away your rights to consistent self-worth. Wade knows that, okay?

He just can’t _say_ it. Not to Nate, who somehow always manages to present like a frozen lake: placid, barren, unbreakable.

And, on top of all that, hiding how deep and complicated he really is.

“The question,” he continues, and Wade feels like it’s harder to breathe when Nate’s talking for some weird reason, “isn’t _whether_ your girlfriend’s done this, but why. And whether she’ll explain why.”

“She pretty much already did,” Wade admits. He tries on a little lift of his shoulders, but it feels out-of-place. So, incidentally, does rubbing his hand over his face. “It was just— It wasn’t _her_ , it was this other person who I didn’t actually like all that much, and I kept having these flashbulb visions of, like, lame-ass double dates at Olive Garden and—” 

Wade’s cell phone rings just then, more than happy to interrupt, and he reaches over to silence the stupid thing. Except it’s not the one in the chair next to him but the one buried in the bottom of his bag, his official work phone paid for by the office. Nate stays quiet, watching him—yeah, even without looking, Wade can feel him _watching_ —as he digs it out and—

“Oh, jesus,” he curses—or name-in-vain-takes, whatever verb you want—because the number on the display is the freaking police station. He thumbs the little green accept button and manages to mash his phone to his ear just in time to hear, “We’ve got Allan Crane for you, hold on.”

Wade is absolutely not proud of the litany of very rude words that come flying out of his mouth at that. He thinks Nate might be a little, because he at least smiles as he pulls himself back up to his desk. Well, smiles ruefully, not in a pleasant, friendly, actual-smile sort of way.

Emotion switch must’ve gotten flicked off in the last couple minutes, then.

The voice that eventually pops up on the other end of the line is panting and breathless, all desperate and adrenaline-shaken. “Listen, man—”

“I swear to god if you touched another goat, I am filing a motion to withdraw,” Wade greets, because he’s not in the mood for Allen’s bullshit. It’s seven—no, eight—at night, the line from the police station is always crackly and filled with static, and he can hear a wide variety of cop sounds in the background. “I won’t even blink twice about it, because the deal was you lay _low_ until we start getting this sorted out, not—”

“I know, man!” Allen cuts in. He sounds about ready to cry, and Wade feels a little guilty for his angry-pants lecture. He also realizes right then that he’s standing in the middle of Nate’s office, halfway through pacing the length of it. Huh. He can’t remember standing up, but apparently, it’s not a big deal to Nate, who’s typing again. “I didn’t do anything to no animal, I swear. We were all out at Peoria’s—”

“Please tell me that’s not a person,” Wade groans.

“—and, I don’t know, there was a bong going around and a keg and the next thing I know I’m getting arrested!” His voice cracks a little. “And because of the other charges, they wanna keep me in here and _man_ , I am not cut out for spending the night in jail, you’ve gotta—”

“Okay, okay, take a breath before you hyperventilate because they’re not going to let you call me back if you end up all collapsed on the floor or whatever.” Nate snorts at that, and Wade flips him off before dragging his fingers back through his hair. “Listen to me, okay? Deep breaths, listening, and maybe we won’t part ways like the last time.”

Allan’s quiet for a couple seconds. “You ripped my head off,” he recalls.

“Yeah, and I don’t want to have to do that tonight. My Friday’s kind of sucked enough. I had to meet with this one attorney, she’s _tough_ , and—”

“Wade,” Nate notes in a blandly helpful tone. On the other end of the line, Wade swears that Allan whimpers.

“Right,” he says, not that he’s sure which one he’s talking to. “Anyway, I don’t have the power to spring you if they want to keep you until you’re formally charged in the morning.” Yeah, this time, he’s absolutely sure about the whimpering. “But I will be there tomorrow when you get charged, okay? And we can argue about bond with the judge, take Rogers to the mat, whatever.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Allan says again. 

Wade considers pointing out that he decided to mix legal and illegal substances while either visiting a friend with a really unfortunate name or while at a bar with a very unfortunate clientele. Instead, he sighs. “I know just what you mean,” he says, and he’s not really lying.

He all but collapses into the stolen Bobby chair a couple minutes later, his work phone tossed next to his personal phone and his head impacting the thin cushioning way too hard. Seriously, there’s a cracking sound and everything, and Nate’s fingers pause on the keyboard.

“I’m not taking you to the hospital if you concuss yourself,” he says after a moment’s pause.

Wade closes his eyes. “You’re a horrible friend and human being, Nathan Goat-Lick Summers.”

“I’m not even counting that one as a miss,” Nate replies, and at least in his exhaustion and frustration, Wade can sort of smile.

 

==

 

Wade tries to sleep that night, but, well. His goat-molesting client is currently wetting himself in fear in a very nice holding cell—seriously, visit central booking sometime, it’s practically a palace of delights—Nate’s finished reworking the child support nightmare into something that sort of functions, and he’s weirdly _not_ tired. He rolls out of bed, pulls a beer out of his fridge, and finds a shitty Lifetime movie to watch.

Hey, a guy needs his hobbies, okay?

He’s a third of the way through this week’s “woman scorned” special when his cell phone buzzes. His actual phone, not his work one. No, he’s pretty much decided to throw his work phone in a pond and lie to Emma about it, because he never wants a call like the one from Allan ever again.

He digs the stupid thing out from where it’s half-fallen between couch cushions and unlocks it.

**Darcy:** _i just restarted this paper for the third time. what is wrong with me???_

The glaring white numbers at the top of the screen indicates that it’s already well after midnight, a time when all good little lawyers and future lawyers should be snoring securely in their beds instead of drinking beer and texting in their boxers. Wade rubs the tension out of the back of his neck and then thumbs the reply box. 

_maybe u need sleep_

**Darcy:** _this is due monday and ive literally done nothing on it because the care and feeding of pregnant physicists. im losing my damn mind._

He snorts a half-laugh and flops over onto the couch long-ways. What? It’s his couch. He can flop on it however he’d like, thank you very much. _and ur abilty to spell_

_this from you_ , she returns immediately. 

It’s when he’s halfway through his retort of _who lse it not liek i handed my phone off r something_ when the stupid thing actually rings. Or, well, it sort of _tries_ to ring, but Wade’s texting thumb hits the green button that accepts the call and then the ringing abruptly stops.

He stares at the screen for a second, horrified that it’s betrayed him like that—not because he’s not in the mood to talk or anything, but it’s after midnight and there is a reason why he’s got his Gmail set up to quiz him about math if he tries to send an e-mail after midnight. Only after he hears Darcy saying, “Wade? Wade, are you there? Are you _dead_?” on the other end does he actually put the phone to his face.

“Sorry, I, uh, dropped it,” he says. He really needs to figure out why his knee-jerk reaction to all things Darcy-related is to lie through his teeth, because that cannot possibly be healthy. He gropes for the remote and mutes the movie just as the pissed-off ex drives her car through a plate glass window. Dammit, he misses all the good action. “Paper sucks?”

“Paper sucks huge donkey balls,” Darcy groans. He hears a noise in the background like maybe she’s flopped onto the nearest flat surface. Like her bed, for instance, with its polka-dot sheets and the Doctor Who poster on the wall and—

Focus, Wilson.

Lucky for him, Darcy’s still talking. “And I really thought the appropriation argument was brilliant, but now, I think I’m just talking out my ass.” She sighs, long and heavy. He imagines her shaking her head. “It’s turning me into a bad person.”

“Appropriation of likeness is turning you into a bad person?” he asks, like maybe he missed something. He probably did, actually, given the whole bed-distraction moment.

“No, but—” She pauses for a long second. Several long seconds, a whole parade of them, enough that Wade can sip his beer. “Do any of your friends have kids?” she asks out of nowhere.

Wade almost chokes on his drink. “Me? My friends? No.” He even shakes his head, not that she can see it. “I mean, Bobby and Mister Perfect are baby-shopping, I think, but only in a lazy, half-interested, ‘we don’t each want to admit to the other that we’re not ready to give up morning sex’ kind of way.”

“I’d watch that,” Darcy says appreciatively.

“Who wouldn’t?” he replies. She laughs at him for a second, all breathy and happy for once, and he’s momentarily proud he didn’t fuck it up by joking. “But seriously, I don’t really know anybody with kids. I don’t even know people who’re in the _position_ to have kids. Why?”

She sighs again. “I’m going to sound like an entire factory store outlet of douchebags.”

“Is there a buy-one, get-one sale?”

“We sell in bulk, like Costco.”

“Lay it on me, then.” And, again, he grins when she snorts. 

The problem isn’t with the snorting, then, but with the way she gets quietly contemplative when the snorting ends. No, really, quietly contemplative; the tone of her voice literally says it all. “I didn’t know Steve before he had a kid, and the whole Tony and Bruce thing was—”

“Weird?” he offers.

“ _Insane_ ,” she agrees, practically elbowing the word. Wade smiles a little and swigs his beer. “So, I mean, I can’t use those to base what’s going on with Jane. But I look at her, and she just seems so—”

“Weird?” Wade tries again.

“Unhappy.” And maybe it’s the condensation on the bottle or the way Darcy’s voice catches when she says the word, but Wade nearly spills beer down his chest Clint Barton style. He swears and swings himself to sit up, because drowning in spilled beer is not a sexy way to die. “She’s stressed out,” Darcy continues, apparently unaware of his attempted death by Rolling Rock, “and she needs support. I _know_ that. And Thor’s not a bad guy, he’s taking care of her, but I . . . ”

She trails off just then, her voice tripping over the last couple words, and Wade forgets about his damp shirt because he’s listening to her breathe. The cadence of her breath is all weird, stuttered and half-caught, and he can’t shake the feeling that she’s starting to get, like, choked up or something. Actually upset about her friend’s special brand of pregnant crazy, about her school work and her life, and that’s—

“Don’t be stupid,” he says without thinking. 

Darcy’s breathing moves from staccato and stuck to absolutely silent.

Shit.

“I mean, look,” he continues, because he’s imbued with at least enough self-preservation to save himself from being left, murdered, in a ditch. “This is a big freaking thing for your buddy, okay? The other night, I was out with Bobby and Nate, and we were talking about the baby-shopping thing, and Bobby flat-out admitted that the whole ‘little tiny person who needs you all the damn time’ thing is fucking _terrifying_. And, I mean, he’s a long ways from it, not two months ‘til popping.” On the other end of the line, Darcy stays incredibly quiet. He imagines that she’s swallowing—or sharpening knives with which to kill him, either-or. “Yeah, she needs you to be there. She needs somebody who’s not stomping around and yelling in Swedish or whatever. But you can’t just throw all your stuff in the corner and be her number one with a bullet, because your stuff’s important too. What you need and want, that matters.”

Darcy stays quiet, her breathing calm and level on the other end of the line, and Wade stares down at the beer bottle that’s dangling from his fingertips. He feels super weird—not physically, but emotionally—and he tries not to blame the pep talk. 

But pep talks aren’t exactly his forte. Mostly because, you know, other people’ve never really bothered propping him up with a pep talk. Really, other people’ve never bothered propping him up at all.

He’s still thinking about his lack of human buttresses when Darcy asks, “Did you quote Fall Out Boy at me?”

Wade blinks. “Did I?”

“Number one with a bullet. Isn’t that from that song with the indecipherable words?” She hums a few bars, right then and there, but— Well, look, Darcy is a very smart and very talented girl but there are some gifts god failed to bestow on her, and the ability to carry a tune is one of them. Wade bobs his head, though, and tries to hum along with the monstrosity she claims is an actual recorded single, and it all fails apart when she finally laughs. It’s breathy and lost, almost like she’s clinging desperately to her last strands of sanity, and hey. Wade knows that feel. 

“Thanks,” she says.

“Hey, what are boy-space-friends for?” he returns, smiling a little.

“Well, this _was_ supposed to be a booty call, but all things considered, cheering me up’s almost as good as getting your pants off.”

And Wade really needs to find out more about Nate’s whole “ridiculous mouth” theory, because his lips sort of fumble through sounds that aren’t really words. When he finally pins any of them down, it’s to demand, “Who says I’m wearing pants right now?”

“I’d be disappointed if you were, since it’s almost one in the morning.”

“You don’t know me. Maybe I sleep in fancy-ass silk pajamas.”

“Or a nightgown,” Darcy muses.

“Or that,” he replies seriously, and this time, her laugh’s a lot fuller.

The woman on the television’s sobbing about something—Wade’s not entirely sure what, but he suspects her ex-husband found something new and horrible to torment her with—when Darcy’s laughter finally drifts away into a sigh. “The Thorling just needs to _get_ here,” she decides while Wade finishes off the dregs of his beer. “It needs to be fat, cute, cuddly, and stop making its mom _crazy_ with baby-stress and pregnancy-brain.”

“If it’s not, you can maybe pawn it off on Stark and the little wife,” Wade suggests with a shrug. “They like kids who didn’t spring from their loins.”

Darcy groans. “I don’t want to think about Tony and Bruce’s loins.”

“I don’t know, Banner’s got the sort of hot nerd thing going on, with the open shirts and the ‘do he got the booty’ pants, maybe—”

“You’re the _worst_!” she declares, and this time, Wade laughs, long enough and hard enough that he knows he’s breaking his shitty apartment complex’s shittily-enforced quiet hours. “I am now going to be writing bullshit about appropriation of likeness while thinking about Bruce and Tony— Nope, not going there.”

“You could always think about Clint and Coulson going at it,” he suggests. He flops back onto the couch again. It feels pretty good to close his eyes and let the mostly-quiet of his apartment wash over him. “And, I mean, bonus points: you know for a fact that those two’ll never breed.”

“From your lips to god’s ears, _please_ ,” Darcy agrees, and Wade’s surprised at how genuinely glad he is that she sounds happy again.

Because, like he said, what else are friends for?


	8. Guard Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade stops guarding himself. Well, a little. It leads to bruises, to kisses, and to weird events he can’t really explain. He’s trying not to dwell on the last one. (But the burrito that ties into the event in question? _Delicious_.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A motion for summary judgment essentially asks the court to decide a case without it going to trial. These motions are usually very long and involved, and they are rarely fun to write.
> 
> This chapter references the outcome of the MPU anniversary ficlet [“Questions Worth Asking.”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/852249/chapters/1633818) You don’t need to read the ficlet in order to understand the chapter, but it’s probably—wait for it—a story worth reading.
> 
> I would buy saranoh and Jen both a thousand burritos. Except I don't think Jen likes burritos? My point is: these ladies are the best, and I appreciate them probably more than they know.

“Listen, man, I—”

“Didn’t do anything, I know,” Wade cuts Allan off, and forces a tiny smile at the suspicious-looking deputy looming nearby.

Saturday first appearances are, on a continuum of first appearances, the absolute worst thing in the known universe, and Wade feels itchy the second he walks into the courtroom. State law’s pretty strict about the whole _appearing within forty-eight hours irrespective of weekends and also special occasions_ thing, which he appreciates as a defense attorney and everything, but—

Well, think about it for a second. The only people who appear on Saturdays are the people picked up on Fridays, right? Generally, on Friday nights. Generally, in big, Friday-night brouhahas the likes of which no human being’s ever seen before or really needs to see again, the kind where the cops probably seriously considered pepper spraying the whole damn bar fight or whatever started the ball rolling.

Because sitting in the row with Allan, all suited up in the little county jail onesies and looking a little like some deranged set of quintuplets, are five very large, very burly, very beaten up biker-type guys with stringy beards and stringier rat tails.

God, no wonder Allan flipped his shit the night before. Wade wonders if he soiled his county-standard shorts.

Each of the brawlers appears to be represented by exactly one member of ABBA—not _actual_ ABBA, but, c’mon, there’re exactly five very Scandinavian attorneys in the county, all with ridiculous Scandinavian names, so they might as well just be ABBA—and each of them appears really, monumentally pissed off. Pissed off enough that Wade exchanges a look and a nod with the deputy that brought them over and then gestures for Allan to sit two rows back with him, instead of with the Hell’s Not-Angels.

“Thanks,” Allan mutters.

“You might not thank me after the bond argument,” Wade replies, and the little almost-smile slips right off Allan’s face. 

He’d spent the first two hours of his morning researching and re-researching the going bond rate for goat-molesters who happen to be picked up on other charges in the interim, but Google’d fundamentally failed him within about ten minutes. Plus, he’d needed to turn safe search on to avoid some truly terrifying imagines that’re now burned into his retinas for _life_ , and Emma’d ignored his text message about goat-related hazard pay. He’d scribbled notes, ripped up the notes, scribbled _new_ notes, and then—halfway through his fourth cup of coffee—searched the public records for any court case ever mentioning an Allan Crane, just to make sure his criminal history really only included the goat.

Turned out, Allan Crane was the child in interest in a Clarion County child welfare case fifteen years ago and ended up living with his dad instead of his mom. Maybe explained the monumental air of douchebag that always wafted up off the kid, but not his propensity for the inappropriate touching of goats.

Alleged touching. Whatever.

Point is, Wade’d tried and _tried_ to find a reasonable basis to drop the kid’s bond down low enough that he or somebody who tolerates him can spring him from jail, and right now, hours later, he’s still coming up blank.

And Steve Rogers is striding into the courtroom. 

Wade likes Steve a lot, but let’s be honest here: Steve loves justice. He loves her like he loves his husband and his cute little kid, loves her like a life partner of twenty-five years, loves her like loving her blind, sword-wielding, scales-holding ass is going out of style. He must’ve memorized the pledge of allegiance backwards and forwards as a kid, because Wade’s pretty sure the guy’s got a _liberty and justice for all_ tramp stamp or something. 

He’s still five feet away from even crossing the bar into the well of the courtroom before Sif’s on him like a bloodhound on a scent, the rest of ABBA trailing right on her heels. “Rogers,” she says sharply, her ponytail swaying with every quick step.

Steve glances at her and smiles. “Miss Rowan,” he greets totally pleasantly. He might be the only attorney in the known universe who enjoys Saturday morning first appearances. “Quite a change to have all six of our first appearances already represented by counsel.”

Sif’s usually-pretty face twists into the fiercest bitchface on the block. Not even Clint could really compete with the murderous prissiness in her glare. “This is serious.”

“I know.” Steve sets his stack of files down on the table and then twists around to face Sif and her Lawyers Four. Well, Lawyers Three and Heimdall, because Wade’s pretty sure he’s not part of the weird almost-incestuous office share the others’ve got going on. “As I understood the affidavits, there was a conspiracy to commit seven car-jackings, at gunpoint, as part of a larger operation that the police are still investigating.”

Wade totally misses the fact that he’s the one whistling until, you know, everybody turns around to glance at him. Seriously, everyone, deputies and brawny guys included. Steve levels him a look that’s almost parental—probably uses that on the kid, you know, the _I’m disappointed I even have to glance in your direction right now_ look—while Sif glares daggers. Oh, not at Wade, at Steve. She’s really pissed off at Steve.

“You can’t hold all five of our clients,” she says, and her boy band backup all nod in unison. “The affidavits are flimsy, the mere _concept_ of a car-jacking conspiracy is ludicrous, and—”

“It’s probable cause, Miss Rowan,” Steve reminds her. It’s still as sunny-side up delightful as any other sentence he’s ever uttered in his life, but his jaw’s kind of tight. Serious, which is weird coming from a guy whose ringtone is probably “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” or something equally as fluffy. “It’s not an especially high bar, and the fact that you’re all here says a lot about their criminal history.”

Sif tosses her ponytail. “We’ll see what Judge Dunbar says about their criminal history.”

She strides off, her homies—what’s the Swedish word for homies, anyway?—on her tail, and Steve shakes his head like maybe Saturday morning court isn’t a delightful break from his home life after all. 

Allan, in the meantime, leans really far into Wade’s personal space. He smells like body odor and what Wade really hopes is not urine. “How’d they get _her_?” he asks. He sounds pretty incredulous, like maybe Sif’s some crazy-ass Scandinavian goddess dropped down on Earth to whip cute assistant district attorneys into shape.

Wade rolls his eyes. “First,” he says, and starts dragging his legal pad out of his battered, abused messenger bag, “ _they_ don’t have her. One of them has her. The other four have some assortment of those guys—” He points over to the gaggle just as Volstagg’s laugh echoes through the courtroom. “—and unless you’re super into Philly cheese steak or, I don’t know, weird ninja fashion statements, it’s pretty hit or miss.”

He swears to god that Hogun’s eyes snap right over to him after the whole “ninja fashion statement” line. He finger-waves, and Hogun snorts.

“And second,” he continues, patting down his pockets for a pen, “Sif starts with them when they’re itty-bitty baby felons. Straight out of the criminal cradle, she nabs them, represents them until they’re thrown into the big house at twenty-one or whatever other horrible thing ends up happening, so I don’t really think you want to know her _too_ well.”

Allan’s incredibly shitty at hiding skepticism, because Wade reads it on his face like a book. Well, like somebody reads a book. His face looks nothing like a book, his face really just looks like an ordinary face.

The skepticism slips away all of three minutes later, when Judge Dunbar starts the docket by glancing at Sif and saying, “I’ll start with Mister Eugene Price, since it’s been a full six months since he graced my courtroom with his presence.” 

Wade allows himself a mental high-five for not snickering at the tough-guy biker named _Eugene_ —and then again when Eugene actually looks really embarrassed to slink up in front of the judge. Unlike him, his friends all boast reasonable names that won’t get them beat up on the terrifying biker playground. _Like_ Eugene, though, they all end up tossed in jail for the time being thanks to their aggravated car-jacking and general pants-wettingly-scary demeanor.

Well, at least, Wade assumes on that last part.

Seriously, even Eugene looks like he could rip out your jugular and not break a sweat.

“I believe that leaves Mister Crane,” Judge Dunbar says once the bikers are all back and comfy in their front-row seats. Wade nudges Allan in the elbow lightly and he rockets out of his chair while Steve officially calls the case and rambles through the state’s intent to consolidate. Allan leans over to ask about it, but Wade waves him off. The complicated mechanisms of law really belong in an office, with coffee, on a Tuesday, not in the middle of court on Saturday morning.

“Mister Crane appears in person and with counsel, Wade Wilson,” he says as he crosses into the well of the courtroom. Allan, brain trust as he is, almost runs into the bar instead of stepping around it. 

“You’re Mister Crane’s attorney in the other matter as well?” the judge asks.

“Yes, sir.”

“And he waives reading of the charges?”

Wade glances over his shoulder at Allan, who nods. “Yes, your honor.”

“Very well.” The judge leans back in his chair. “The state on bond?”

“Your honor,” Steve says in _that_ tone, the _I have been waiting all morning for you to ask me this very question_ tone, all perfectly-rational and absolutely lawyerly, “Mister Crane is currently out on bond through his other case, which includes a serious animal cruelty charge.” Judge Dunbar’s lips twitch in a way that broadcast just how well he remembers Allan’s other charges. “Despite this, the charges he picked up last night include public intoxication, possession of drug paraphernalia, and public exposure of his person.”

The judge’s lips twitch again. A quick glance at Allan reveals that his face and neck are a lovely shade of bright tomato red. Wade bites back a sigh, and finds out that the effort actually hurts like a bitch.

“These are misdemeanors,” Steve continues, “but coupled with the seriousness of the felony behavior, the state feels that at least a five thousand dollar bond is warranted.”

Allan releases a squawking sound not unlike the noise a dying parrot might make. Wade twists to glare at him, but then Judge Dunbar asks, “Mister Wilson? Any thoughts?”

“Yes, your honor,” he answers. For a couple seconds, he and Allan engage in this weird standoff where Allan looks tempted to open his pot-smoking, beer-drinking, indecent-exposing mouth and Wade feels _actually_ tempted to let him. But then, the guy dips his eyes toward the ratty carpet, his sad dreadlocks sagging, and Wade—

“Mister Wilson?” Judge Dunbar repeats.

“He didn’t come near a goat.” 

They’re the first words that pop into Wade’s head, stupid, nonsensical words that jump out into the air before he can stop them, and he knows without looking that Steve’s staring at him. Steve and Allan, actually, because he can feel Allan’s glare burning a hole in the back of his head. He twirls his pen for a second, then sets it down on the podium and— “Look, the new charges, yeah, they’re a thing that exist. And going out and getting into whatever trouble my client got into while he’s already on bond, we can all sit down and talk about the wisdom of that down in the cafeteria sometime. But bonds are to protect the community from the same perpetrator doing the same thing all over again, right? We don’t want to let a bad apple revictimize people while they’re waiting on a trial.”

He glances over at Allan—Allan, with the glowing red face and the fucking fed-up glare of death under his floppy dreadlocks—and then sort of shakes his head. “He didn’t revictimize anybody,” he presses. When he looks back up at Judge Dunbar, the man’s leaning way back in his chair, his hands folded over his belly. He reminds Wade of a dark-chocolate Santa Claus. “He stayed away from animals, he didn’t hurt anybody, nothing awful happened. The bond he’s already on’s serving its purpose, it’s keeping him from doing the same thing all over again, and we should let him ride it out.”

The judge rolls his lips together, considering. Wade spends a lot of time in front of Judge Dunbar with first appearances and random other little docket events—covering mental health hearings for Bobby, for instance, or the one really horrible time he somehow ended up defending a lady on a debtor-creditor action—so he’s fairly certain he knows Dunbar’s thinking face. He also knows that he can feel his own nervousness clawing its way up from the pit of his stomach.

Hey, he started his bond argument by talking about goats. If that didn’t constitute a freaking embossed invitation to appear before the disciplinary board, Wade’d eat his shoes. And he likes today’s shoes.

Finally, though, the judge nods. “Mister Crane’s bond for the other matter is set at a thousand dollars,” he recites, sitting up just enough to read from the case file in front of him. “And his lapse in judgment aside, I see no reason to increase it. Provided,” he adds, his sharp eyes flicking right over to where Allan is literally and figuratively shaking in his official Suffolk County Jail orange crocs, “that there are no more charges in the interim.”

“No, sir,” Wade answers before Allan can even blink, never mind open his mouth. Not because he doesn’t trust Allan to say sensible things in front of the judge, but because—

Oh, who the hell is he kidding? He trusts Allan exactly as far as he can throw him, and he’s lost almost all of his lacrosse muscle tone by now.

The judge assigns the next court date—in front of Judge Nguyen, meaning that Wade has a lifetime of new and exciting bitch-faces to look forward to—and then sternly reminds Allan to be on his best behavior. Allan flushes a funny color but hastily agrees, and then the dog-and-pony show (bong-and-goat show?) comes to a much-needed end. The deputy responsible for the five serious felons and Wade’s softer, fluffier felon looks pretty impatient to march them all back down to holding, so Wade quick gives Allan the nod. “Call me Tuesday,” he instructs, “and maybe we can start figuring all this out.”

“Maybe?” Allan squeaks.

“Figment of speech!” Wade promises, throwing his hands up. Allan stares at him like he’s the devil incarnate for his whole march out of the courtroom. Probably’d do it his whole way down the hall, too, but walls and shit are pretty inconvenient for betrayed and worried gaping.

Behind him, Steve says, “Good luck with that.” It is the least supportive well-wishing Wade’s ever heard, and when he twists around, the guy’s standing on a grin.

“I will pay you two million dollars if you somehow convince your husband to take this case,” he replies. Steve laughs. “Clint? I’ll even go with Odinson, here, I just need to live in a world where I am not expected to argue goat-penetration with Hill or Coulson.”

“Like I said,” Steve repeats, grinning like the invisible little devil-Rogers that clearly lives on his shoulder and whispers bad thoughts into his ear, “good luck.”

Wade enacts most righteous vengeance on Steve and his smirk by ordering a massive pizza with extra pepperoni, twelve hot wings, and two giant bottles of Mountain Dew to pick up on his way home. Don’t ask how that’s revenge. It’s delicious, he deserves it, and Steve Rogers is a jerk.

Later, at home, he’s halfway through his pizza and on the third episode of what he hopes’ll constitute a truly epic _Murder, She Wrote_ marathon when his phone buzzes from the middle of the coffee table. He twists around, nearly falls off the couch, and finally manages to thumb his way through to the text message screen.

 **Nathan ________ Summers:** _How’s your goatophile?_

He forgets to listen to Sheriff Tupper’s usual grumpy bitching because he’s literally staring at his phone like he’s actually a caveman and can’t wrap his head around this ridiculous new technology.

Finally, miraculously, he manages to type, _uh_. He almost sends it, too, but a single syllable barely counts as an answer to the question. A non-answer means Nate might go all weird-silent again. Or, worse, Nate might call him.

Oh, god, _no_.

 _free as a bird that hes also not gonn badtouch_ , he replies. Every key-mash feels clumsy, like he’s borrowed somebody else’s thumbs. Dammit, and Wade enjoys his own thumbs a lot. He’s found them very useful in a pinch.

(Get it? Pinch?)

Jessica Fletcher’s just about to be run off the road while she’s riding her bike when Wade’s phone buzzes a second time. The shock’s worn off, at least, so there’s no fish-faced gaping at the stupid thing when he opens up his messages.

 **Nathan ________ Summers:** _Glad to hear it. Have a good Saturday._

 _yeah_ , Wade types back dumbly.

It’s really hard to fully immerse himself in Jessica’s Cabot Cove adventures, after that.

 

==

 

“And once I finished freaking out that I’d fucked up our whole relationship, Phil asked me to move in with him.”

The secret of muy thai, other than being quick as a coursing river with all the strength of the great typhoon, is keeping your guard up. Their instructor repeats it eighty million times a lesson, sometimes stopping to smack people on the back of the head: guard up! And as much as you can criticize Wade for his hundred negative personality traits—spazzy, loud-mouthed, disorganized, incompetent, the usual—you can’t really harp on him for dropping his guard in muy thai.

Except, of course, for when his best non-work friend announces that his boyfriend asked him to move in. Then, Wade drops his guard like a hot potato, Clint lands a kick, and the whole world tips at a couple weird angles.

The floor mats, by the way, are not that cushy. In fact, they’re like vinyl-covered concrete.

“The hell’s wrong with you?” Clint demands. He immediately offers a hand up, which is nice and all, but Wade decides maybe he should stay there on the floor. The ceiling’s not too bad, his skull’s still kind of pounding from where it impacted the unpadded mats with a resounding thump, and he really wasn’t in the mood to practice for his next belt test, anyway.

Their instructor stops in the middle of his rounds to loom over him, hands on his hips. “Guard up,” he chides.

“Guard totally doesn’t count when your friends drop cohabitation bombs on you,” Wade returns. The guy narrows his eyes and then stalks off to yell at a couple meaty college kids who want to be the next Dragon Baller. That’s what they call fans of the show, right? Dragon Ballers? Whatever. 

Wade closes his eyes. Clint, supportively, kicks his leg at about the same time. “Get up.”

“Stars. Can’t do it. Not today.”

“Are you quoting a movie or are you broken? I can’t tell.”

“Me neither.” When he finally cracks his eyelids enough to let in a sliver of reality, everything’s pretty much as he left it: ceiling, concrete-feeling mat, Clint standing over him in his sweatpants and t-shirt. The sleeves hardly contain the shear square-footage of his freaking arms, and Wade raises his hands and presses his palms really hard to his eyes. It’s only Monday, and he needs the week to be over. Not because of Clint, necessarily, but the Phil-related love fest isn’t exactly helping.

Something occurs to him, and he lifts exactly one hand. At least Clint’s breadth blocks out the fluorescent lights. “Did you say yes?”

Clint, it turns out, gives truly fantastic confused-face. Seriously, if such a thing as expression porn existed, Clint’d probably win an Oscar. Because his brow folds up and his lips purse before he asks, “To what?”

“To Chief Assistant Creepy’s invitation to be his permanent bed-buddy.”

And as quick and beautifully as it dawned, the confusion dissipates. A lot like a short-lived amateur porn career, actually. “Of course I said yes,” he answers. “Did you think I’d say no?”

“No,” Wade admits, and covers his eyes again. 

“It’s not that I’m not happy for you,” he explains in the YMCA locker room twenty minutes later, once Clint’d traded him for one of the college kids and spent the rest of their spar-time laughing about some guy named after a musical instrument. Clint glances back over his shoulder as he deposits his sweat-soaked shirt in his gym bag, and Wade bangs his head back against a locker. Wade hates changing in public—the flashbacks of being the skinniest kid on the lacrosse team are still burned in his brain, or whatever—and so he’s just watching the show. Clint, specifically, not the other guys from their class. That’d be creepy.

He apparently also is too focused on watching, because Clint’s whole face tightens. “Wade?”

“Yeah, right,” he replies, and lightly bangs his head against the locker a second time, just for good measure. “I’m happy for you and Coulson. You can help turn the house into a home, you know? Maybe clean out that cabinet that’s full of stuff he bought at Costco, because who really needs seven flats of water and—”

“Wade.”

Clint’s no longer dressing or undressing, but watching him back. Wade scrubs a hand through his damp hair, then almost rubs his face with it before realizing its gross now, and ends up drying his palm on his yoga pants. “It’s great,” he says, and tries really hard to mean it. “I’m just overwhelmed. With work, and stuff.” The other guy tips his head to the side like a curious puppy who piddled on the carpet, so Wade sticks his hands up. “Work and stuff only, accept no substitutions.”

He thinks for a second that’ll be it—correction, explanation, everything tied up with a little pink bow like the ones on lacy panties—and he even breathes a sigh of relief when Clint returns to his locker. He tugs on his work shirt and starts doing up the buttons, normal-like, and Wade swigs his water.

He’s in the process of swallowing when Clint asks, “Why do you do this?”

And that’s the moment where Wade unlocks the extra-rare achievement of not shooting water out his nose. He chokes a little, sure, but nothing escapes. Just in case, he drags the back of his hand over his mouth. “What?”

“What you just did.” Clint abandons the sultry over-the-shoulder glance to turn all the way around. His shirt hangs halfway open, flashing some nipple. Wade really wishes life functioned like a comic book, complete with censor bars over delicate body parts. No one really needs a Clinton Barton nip-slip, after all. “Something’s clearly bothering you, but you deflect. Hell, ‘deflect’ isn’t even the right word. You do like a magician and make whoever’s asking look to the left while you pull the rabbit out with your right.”

“I have a rabbit?”

 _Wow_ , okay, that is one fed-up look from Clint Barton. It’d actually impress the yoga pants right off Wade if it didn’t terrify him into almost wetting them. “You are actually one of my friends, you know. I care about why the spaz’s turned up to eleven.”

For a couple seconds, Wade considers surrendering himself to a truly epic case of verbal diarrhea. Hey, why the hell not, you know? Clint’s neither an attractive woman nor his girl-space-friend, there’s no chance of them screwing and him needing to creep out down a fire escape—at least, he hopes—and maybe that’s what he needs in his life. Maybe what he needs is that one friend he can bare himself to. That’s always how it works in the movies, at least; Spock shows his emotional range to Kirk, Hermione cries to Harry about Ron and his seriously less-sexy girlfriend, Katniss saves her sister.

Wait, that’s not on point.

Whatever. What _is_ on point is the idea that maybe what he needs is to talk this through with somebody who actually knows what he wants out of life. Somebody like Clint, who’s coupled-up and accepting the gauntlet of managing Coulson’s cabinet of seriously useless shit.

But then, Wade remembers the conversation when he first asked Darcy out, and the way Clint’s worry usually manifests in weird and unusually hostile ways.

“I go to trial against Natasha on Thursday,” he says, rubbing the side of neck. “And there’s this project I’m working on with Nate, plus Allan Crane, first of his name, molester of goats, is turning out to be _super _high-maintenance and I am just not sure there are enough hours left in the day for everything on my to-do list. Hell, quality time with lotion and a box of—”__

__“Don’t,” Clint warns. His full-body cringe is absolutely amazing._ _

__Wade grins at him. “It’s just a stupid-crazy week this week, that’s all,” he swears. The good news is, his smile naturally slips at the place you’d expect after the busy lawyer’s lament. Accidental timing is clearly the very best timing. “I had to dip into the stores of energy normally reserved for creepily-in-love friends in order to power through sixty pages of bestiality case law. Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, by the way. Or my worst Regina King-style frenemy, actually.”_ _

__Even half-dressed and sweat-stained from a night of muy thai, Clint’s attentive, unconvinced staring is pretty unnerving. He reminds Wade of those creepy stories you used to read in elementary school, the ones about looking under the bush and seeing glowing eyes just before everything went to shit. When his brow tightens, then, Wade flashes a forced, toothy grin; when Clint sighs, hey, it feels like a step in the right direction._ _

__“Regina George,” Clint finally says, turning back around._ _

__Wade, like, literally cannot keep himself from laughing. It hurts behind his ribs, and not just because the chunky college kid landed some pretty nasty blows every time Wade’d zoned out on him._ _

__He can practically feel Clint scowling, too, which is icing on an already epic cake. “Shut up,” he says. “Stark’s kid put it on last time I was over there. It’s still in my brain.”_ _

__“Darcy’s going to _love_ this,” Wade wheezes. He’s clutching his stomach and trying to breathe through the hilarity when Clint whirls around. His face tries to carry a world’s worth of woes on it, but Wade knows the little twitch at the corners of those excellent lips, and the twinkle barely hiding in his eyes. “She’s going to fall over laughing, probably bruise something, and it’s going to be the best.”_ _

__“As long as you’re still talking to her, I can live with that,” Clint replies, and his gym bag._ _

__Wade’s two-thirds of the way home from the YMCA when he realizes he has absolutely no idea what Clint meant by “still talking to Darcy”—and he’s all the way home when he decides it’s probably not a _good_ thing._ _

__

__==_ _

__

__“I cannot believe they are actually moving in together!” Darcy laments, and bodily throws herself onto Wade’s couch so hard, Wade thinks she might fall on the floor._ _

__“You were supposed to laugh about Clint knowing the characters from _Mean Girls_ , not— Hey!” The second throw pillow actually hits Wade square in the face, since his hands were busy recovering from catching the first one, and everything._ _

__It’s almost ten p.m. on Tuesday night and really, honestly, Wade should be in bed. In bed alone, by the way, nothing dirty. He should be in bed, alone, and sleeping, thanks to a truly long day filled with trial prep, three new defense intakes, and Allan. Allan, who wandered in looking like he hadn’t slept in three weeks and practically wept all over the conference room before Wade steered him back out through the lobby and promised to call him when all the police reports showed up._ _

__Carol’d popped her head into his office twenty minutes later and, wordlessly, tossed him one of those tiny bottles of Bath and Body Works hand sanitizer. “I e-mailed you a list of clinics that do rabies shots,” she’d announced._ _

__Wade’d flipped her off, but kept the hand stuff. Hey, it smelled like a margarita. You’d hold onto it too._ _

__But interruptions aside, he’d finished most of his questions for direct examination on Thursday, sketched out some main points to bring up on cross, and started discovery motions for two of the three new clients before leaving the office and emerging into the bitter cold February air. The warm embrace of his couch’d felt wonderful, his dinner of slightly-undercooked frozen ravioli tasted pretty okay, and he’d just started an episode of _Quincy, M.D._ when Darcy’d texted him from his parking lot and asked to come up._ _

__He regrets, just for a second, ever inviting her in before trivia. Not because having her around sucks or anything, but because now, she knows where he lives._ _

__She’s also drinking his beer—not _his_ bottle, he finished drinking an hour ago, but one from his fridge—and wriggling her sock-covered toes. She’s wearing sweats, a sure sign she came from the law school instead of, well, wherever else girls might originate. The mall? That nail place next to Chipotle? The beauty shop?_ _

__“God,” Darcy groans, and Wade jerks his head away from the TV (Sam and Quincy snarking at each other, quality stuff) to watch her rub her palms into her eyes. Her glasses hang loosely from one of her hands, just like her hair hangs all loose and curly off the edge of the couch. “I swear, I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to lose my mind.”_ _

__He will until his death firmly deny the way his mouth dries out or his heart kind of stutters like a crappy car trying to start in the cold. “Uh,” he says. He stares at her while she replaces her glasses and tips her head in his direction. Then, he swallows. “Do what, exactly?”_ _

__“Be friends with all these people who turn into adults every time my back is turned!” She kicks her feet off the couch and uses the momentum to sit up; she swigs her beer and then slams it back down so hard that foam rises up the neck. “Is this what being in your mid-twenties is like? A constant stream of everyone you know getting married, or moving in with their significant others, or popping out kids?”_ _

__She expects an answer. Wade _knows_ she expects an answer, and he stares at her while he tries to find one. The problem is, his heart’s still a little off-kilter from the part of the conversation with the _I can’t do this anymore_ , and his mouth feels all sandpapery and weird. He switches off the TV and tosses the throw pillows onto his beanbag chair, but mostly just to buy time. Darcy, meanwhile, drinks her beer like it’s the last beverage on the entire earth._ _

__“I think for Clint, this is, like, a really weird mid-life crisis,” Wade finally says, and she snorts hard enough that he thinks she might spray his quality IKEA coffee table with beer. He steps over the thing and flops down on the couch next to her; when she hands him the bottle, he helps himself to two huge swallows before returning it. “I mean, most people buy a two-door soft-top and find a chesty Bea Arthur look-alike—”_ _

__Darcy pulls a face. “We have got to talk about your taste in women, present company excluded.”_ _

__“—but I guess since Clint’s the master of wayward youth and past poor choices, settling down with Coulson’s sort of the next best thing.” He rests his head on the back of the couch and stares up at the ceiling. “But, I mean, if you think about it, he skipped doing this shit when he was our age, right? Committed his minor felonies, jumped right into a life of finding himself, waited an extra hundred years or whatever, and _then_ did what folks like Jane and Bobby can’t put off for even five minutes.”_ _

__Beside him, Darcy sighs. When he glances over, she’s returning from ditching the empty beer bottle on the coffee table, and within a half-second, they’re staring each other down. It’s funny, Wade thinks, how he raises his arm along the back of the couch without even a second thought, or how she sort of slots her body into the space beside him. She presses her cheek to his shoulder through his ratty t-shirt, he drags her against him a little tighter than he means to, and they sit there in silence, together in the almost-dark._ _

__“Maybe we’re doomed, a little,” he says after what feels like only a couple minutes but what, according to the clock, is a whole half-hour. Darcy tips her head up, her chin almost on his shoulder, and he casts his eyes down before he shrugs. “I feel like there’s this, I don’t know, algorithm or something,” he explains, his free hand lifting from his leg and drawing some weird theoretically-mathematical pattern in front of him. Maybe an asymptote. He’d loved saying that word back in high school. “A formula or something, you know? And you put in all this information about yourself—school, job, hopes, dreams, height, favorite color—and poof! Your perfect life appears on a slip of paper and you can, I don’t know, use it as a shopping list at Fulfilling Lives ‘R’ Us.”_ _

__Darcy laughs, all soft and bell-like, and pushes slowly away from him. He twists on the couch, tucking up a leg in the sliver of space between them, and suddenly they’re facing one another, her eyes all warm and grinning while his stupid mouth keeps moving._ _

__“But the machine that runs the formula—no human could actually manage all this on their own, so there’d have to be a machine, right?—it fucks up, sometimes. It, I don’t know, runs out of paper for some people. Or people lie to it, and then there’s a big divorce because really, Tom didn’t want to marry B’Elanna after all, and everything gets all gummed up.” He spends a second trying to demonstrate this with his hands, to space them out and act like they’re glued together, but all he really succeeds in doing is making Darcy laugh again. He lets his hands fall into his lap, but they’re still staring each other down, Darcy still smiling and Wade—_ _

__She’s so pretty, Wade thinks. She’s pretty and smart, she’s actually and objectively _wonderful_ , and he’s—_ _

__“The machine fucks up,” he keeps saying, and tries to ignore the way that his voice feels scratchy and unfamiliar, a pack-a-day smoker’s voice, “and while Jane and Thor are off making babies, other people end up in second careers or changing their majors seven times or attracted to friends who absolutely will never want them back in a hundred years.” The snort that follows, for the record, is completely involuntary and accidental. The way Darcy’s face softens probably is, too. Wade forces a little smile and nudges her knee with his hand. “And people end up waiting around. Like, you know, Clint.”_ _

__The smile that crosses Darcy’s face flickers like a firefly. “Like Clint,” she agrees, a murmur that’s half-lost by a car backfiring in the parking lot, and then she’s kissing him._ _

__She’s kissing him, or he’s kissing her, Wade’s not sure which. Maybe it’s both, or maybe it’s just the suddenly-mutual understanding that the wish-granting machine that’s supposed to run their lives is all fucked up and leaving them on their own. Either way, he suddenly needs her mouth like he needs air, needs her to release a little moaning sound when he sucks on her lower lip, needs her to climb into his lap and straddle him. Her fingers dig into his scalp, grabbing handfuls of his hair and keeping him close, and before Wade even realizes what he’s doing, his fingers shoving her sweatshirt up far enough that he can plaster them to her bare back._ _

__Her skin feels feverish. He feels woozy and overwhelmed, drunk on— What? Two swallows of beer and a late-night existential crisis?_ _

__Or maybe he’s drunk on the way Darcy presses her hips down, how she moves in his lap like something out of a video he definitely paid good money for, and he actually needs to break the kiss to groan, after that._ _

__“I—” he starts to say, but Darcy’s fingernails through his hair and she drags him in for another kiss. The next thing he knows, his face is in the crook of her neck and she’s—_ _

__Look, make your own assumptions, just know her sweatpants are thin, his pajama pants are thin, and those two facts are definitely mutually beneficial. At least, if the way Darcy’s breath sounds in his ear is any sort of indication._ _

__“I have trial prep tomorrow,” Wade manages to half-say, half- _whine_ , his hands dragging up and down Darcy’s thighs. He really likes her thighs, he decides right then. He really likes all of her, actually, how substantial she feels, how she’s _real_ instead of something in his head. “The best I can offer is—” The complete failure of his mental faculties, apparently, because she tips her head and grazes her teeth along his jaw, way too sexy for actual words. _ _

__When she sits back a little, Wade can feel his heartbeat in every one of his appendages—yes, really, _every_ one—and his tongue feels three times too thick for his mouth. Darcy’s breathing heavy, too, her full lips a delicious red and her hair a tangled mess of _awesome_. He considers running his fingers through it, but he knows his hands’ll shake if he releases her thighs._ _

__She raises an eyebrow in challenge. “You had an offer?” she asks like a cat with a freaking half-dead mouse._ _

__He’s the mouse. Just, you know, for the record._ _

__He also wets his lips. “I was going to say a rain check, but now I think an hour of truly excellent making out with a side of heavy petting.”_ _

__Darcy’s laugh is wild and free, more deserving of a joyride in a fast car or a running jump off the top of a waterfall than somebody like him. It rushes through his chest, curls around his lungs, and squeezes._ _

__He squeezes her thighs, not on purpose, and she half-leans, half-falls forward, her arms sliding past his shoulders to rest against the back of the couch. She invades his personal space until their noses nudge, then reaches up long enough to toss her glasses onto the coffee table. They stare at one another for a few seconds, too close for any kind of focus._ _

__Maybe that’s for the best, Wade thinks. But then again, Wade thinks a lot of stupid, useless things._ _

__Like how much he likes the tickle of her breath in the three seconds before she says, “I’ll be the judge of the excellence, thank you,” and kisses him again._ _

__

__==_ _

__

__“Can I get you lunch?” Nate asks Wade approximately thirteen and a half hours after Darcy left Wade’s apartment with her hair all mussed up and her bra in her bag instead of, you know, under her shirt. Not that Wade’s thinking about that as he sits in his office, mumbling his way through his third re-write of his opening argument, or whatever._ _

__Nope._ _

__He just happens to elbow over his bottled water, knock three files off his desk, and almost fall out of his chair because Nate, who is tall and broad and not at all subtle, snuck up like a ninja._ _

__And if you believe that, he wants to sell you some oceanfront property in Kansas._ _

__“Fuck,” he mutters, and ducks down to pick up the mess because it’s that or facing Nate. Nate, who’s standing in his doorway at one-oh-seven in the afternoon, dressed in gray slacks and a perfectly-pressed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned. Nate, who looks like he’s probably spent the morning writing a motion for summary judgment or something equally solitary, because he has glasses-dimples on his nose and he’s lost his watch somewhere along the line. Nate, who is definitely not the person who ended up shirtless on his couch last night and bucking up against his—_ _

__Okay, well, let’s keep this a nice, fluffy PG-13. Nothing you wouldn’t want your boss glancing at over your shoulder at work, or whatever. Point is, Nate is Nate and nobody else, and Wade feels very strange about knowing under which circumstances he removes his watch._ _

__He dumps a couple napkins from his super-healthy McDonalds breakfast on top of the wet patch, tosses the folders all in his out-bin (as though the administrative assistant he shares with Nate will ever voluntarily set foot in his office), and then pops his head back over the top of the desk._ _

__Nate’s still standing there, his lips creased into a little smile._ _

__Wade pretends he’s mopping up the water just long enough to rest his head against the wood._ _

__It’s not Nate’s fault, or really anyone else’s fault, that he’s stupid-exhausted this morning. No, the fault rests firmly on his own shoulders—and maybe Darcy’s, too, all pale and bare in the half-light of his living room. Because much like the Acropolis (where the Parthenon is), there were absolutely no straight lines in Wade’s apartment at eleven-thirty the night before, and heavy petting—a solid double in on your sexual scorecard—sort of turned into a triple._ _

__Like, a serious, _serious_ triple._ _

__The kind of triple where a better batter would’ve chanced the in-the-ballpark homerun, but settled for a reciprocity and the discovery that maybe he’s only into nails on his scalp. Maybe he’s just really into scalp stuff. If that’s an actual thing._ _

__“Wade?” Nate asks, and Wade heaves a sigh before crawling back into his chair. He’s tired, the stupid domestic battery case he’s defending tomorrow feels hopeless, and he’s supposed to call Allan at two and reassure him that his life isn’t over because he can’t toke up during his hacky-sack tournament next Monday. Or, you know, whatever the latest insecurity is._ _

__He scrubs a hand over his face before answering, “Nathan Lady Marmalade Summers?”_ _

__The tiny smile nudges further at Nate’s lips. “I think you tried that about a hundred guesses ago.”_ _

__“Well, that’s what you get for sneaking up on me: a sub-par entrance into the world of witty repartee.”_ _

__The chuckle that burbles up from the center of Nate’s chest and then out into the air is probably illegal in some states. He should call Rogers. Rogers’d know. “I wanted to know if I could get you lunch,” Nate says after he’s finished chuckling. Again. Says it again, not the chuckling. A three-year-old could total up the number of Nate-chuckles Wade’s heard in his nineteen-ish months at legal aid._ _

__But even after the water spill and the folders and the dramatic pause, Wade’s knee jerk response to the question is still, “What?”_ _

__“Lunch,” Nate says, all languid and indulgent. He leans his shoulder against the doorframe. “It’s a midday meal eaten in many cultures. I believe the word comes from the old German—”_ _

__“How do you even know that?” Wade demands. The other man raises an all-knowing and frankly creepy eyebrow, and Wade decides the only way to block whatever snarky, snide, smart-ass remark comes next is to hold up his hands. “No, never mind, I don’t want to know how you know that. It’s probably weird, and I’ve had enough weird for the day.”_ _

__“Aren’t you in trial prep?” Nate asks. He also crosses his arms, which just flashes more distracting forearms. This, universe. This is why Wade perpetually cannot have nice things._ _

__But instead of admitting to forearm envy—just envy, absolutely nothing stronger—he answers, “No.” Nate presses his lips together in a way that might actually be a half-human expression. You know, like a grin. “I’m in a kind of weird legal purgatory where every third word looks like it’s spelled wrong, where every sentence gets so jumbled up that it sounds like I grew up speaking Wingdings, and where I just want to call Natasha and grovel for any deal that doesn’t involve juries, judges, or her red stiletto heels.” He raises his hands with exciting plans to press the heels into his eye sockets, but then he pauses. He pauses, and he really _thinks_ about what he’d just said. “Well, okay, I take that back: the heels are fine. Rest of it, I can live without.”_ _

__He swears the rumbling noise that burbles up out of Nate counts as another laugh. He can’t tell for sure, though, since he really is rubbing his eyes and trying to remember a simpler time before actual trials in front of actual terrifying she-lawyers._ _

__“You’re like this before every trial,” Nate comments._ _

__“I’m like this after a double-sized Red Bull, two McMuffins, and one of Emma’s Special K bars. And by the way, I can still hear actual chocolate-covered pretzels weeping in shame after seeing what Kellogg’s has reduced them to.” When Wade finally drops his hands again, Nate’s grinning. It’s a warm look on his face, all full of laugh lines and actual real-boy joy. Wade traces how his eyes scrunch up and the shape of his mouth for a long time before something super weird occurs to him._ _

__He narrows his eyes. “Wait, back to you,” he says, and Nate raises his eyebrows. “Why are you—Nathan Hello Kitty Summers—offering to bring me the old-German midday meal?”_ _

__Surprisingly—or maybe unsurprisingly; Wade’s pretty sure he could go either way on this one, being as today’s apparently Topsy-Turvy Day here at Suffolk County Legal Aid (thanks, Nate-smiles!)—Nate’s grin never falters. Seriously, not even for the barest of seconds. “You haven’t left your office since I got in this morning. I thought you might be hungry.” He stops for a second, and the grin actually grows. “I think that was guess 248, by the way.”_ _

__“249,” Wade corrects, “but I wasn’t really trying. Like I said before: ninja-sneaking means bargain-basement banter.” Nate shakes his head, and for a second, that’s how they stay: Wade leaning back in his chair and bouncing a little, Nate leaning against his doorframe with those magnificently unfair arms crossed over his barrel of a chest. Wade studies him, watching as his laugh lines soften and his lips roll together into something a lot more thoughtful than shit-eating grin._ _

__He’s like an ogre, Wade realizes. No, not the _Lord of the Rings_ kind—besides, those are orcs, get your fantasy baddies sorted. He’s a _Shrek_ ogre, full of onion-style layers. And every time Wade peels one away, he finds seventy-three more, just waiting for him._ _

__“I had two McMuffins and a Special K bar,” he finally answers, shrugging a little. He’s not sure why _that’s_ his answer—he’s not exactly one to turn down food, especially when someone else plans on delivering it—but it rolls off his tongue almost entirely without his permission. “This argument’s not writing itself, so really, it’s better if I—” _ _

__Embarrass himself with a grumbling gut, apparently, because that’s how the sentence ends: Wade’s stomach growls loud enough that people in Russia probably recorded it as seismic activity. Nate, the somewhat-classy bastard he is, just tips his head to one side; Wade, the completely-classless asshole in the occasion, feels his face start to pink up. It’s officially the dumbest thing in the world to feel shame over, too, so he ducks his head back to his notes._ _

__“Get me whatever,” he says. He feels like the kid who just threw up at prom. Hey, that shit happens, okay?_ _

__Wade’s not sure, but he thinks he can _feel_ Nate smiling at him. “That’s a lot of latitude.”_ _

__“Well, turns out I’m a lot of hungry,” Wade snipes back. Another rumbly chuckle later, the doorframe creaks._ _

__When Wade finally lifts his head, he’s alone in his office. You know, as god intended, and whatever._ _

__Twenty-five minutes later, grumbling stomach mostly-forgotten and the memory of Emma’s shamefully bad Special K bar faded entirely from his mind, Wade stands in front of his window and tries to rehearse his opening argument. “‘She’s mad ‘cause I dumped her and wants to make it hurt,’” he says, and his distorted reflection stares back at him as he paces the five feet between his desk and the wall. He wants the words of this, his fifth draft, to roll off his tongue. Instead, they sort of half-roll, half- _fall_. “That’s what Leo Follis told his best friend less than twenty-four hours before his girlfriend Renee called the cops on him. ‘She’s mad,’ he said to Kevin Weidner—a man who’s known Leo since high school, a man who will testify to Leo’s reputation as a good, honest, decent guy, and holy shit, whatever that is smells _amazing_.”_ _

__Nate laughs as Wade spins around, a low, rumbling sound in his throat that could probably rev the engines of every car in the latest _Speedy and Relatively Mad_ movie. He’s back in the doorway, still all rolled-up and unbuttoned, his hair still a little mussed and his shoulders still enormous, and he’s grinning again, too. He’s grinning, it’s warm, and Wade—_ _

__Wade’s spent a year and a half bickering and snarking with Nate Summers, convincing himself that the man’s an android who definitely doesn’t believe in either the milk of human kindness or love._ _

__But suddenly, today, another ogre-layer disappears and he’s just _Nate_ , this guy with an office down the hall who happens to know the etymology of words like “lunch.” He’s broad and tall, his hair probably went white before his twelfth birthday, and his chuckle’s super-maddening. He’s a colleague, he’s almost a _friend_ , and— _ _

__He holds up a paper bag, just then, and Wade’s train of thought derails so violently that somebody should probably declare the rest of his brain a federal disaster area. “You did _not_ go all the way out to Burrito King,” he accuses._ _

__Nate’s grin grows, almost as bright as the neon green Burrito King logo, which features a dancing taco wearing a sombrero. “I certainly don’t have six empty bags in my car, like some other people I will respect by not naming.”_ _

__“Dude, you can disrespect me eighteen ways from Sunday and in every position you know if you actually went to Burrito King.” Wade tosses his legal pad onto his desk, taking out two stacks of post-it notes, his empty water bottle, and a wrapper left over from his McMuffin breakfast, but he can’t even bring himself to care. No, garbage is irrelevant to the sweet and wonderful feel of that waxy white bag in his hands—and better still, the smell of spices that flood his nostrils as soon as he cracks it open._ _

__He inhales like he’s sucking in a line of cocaine. “Sweet carne asada, I am going to spend the next seventeen minutes making slow and passionate mouth-love to you, you do not even _know_.”_ _

__The expression that immediately crawls its way onto Nate’s usually-placid face hovers somewhere between amused and horrified. He definitely employs the Emma-eyebrow, though, which says a lot. “Should I leave you two alone?” he asks, gesturing to Wade and his beautiful bouncing baby burrito._ _

__“Yes,” Wade immediately answers, then blinks and amends, “Actually, wait, no. No, what you need to do, right now, is grab _your_ burrito—and that’s not a euphemism, even if I’m tempted due to this momentous gift of tortilla-wrapped joy.” He’s not entirely sure, on account of the intoxicating scent of salsa and dry-rubbed, slow-cooked beef wafting up out of the bag, but he thinks Nate casts his eyes down at the floor for a second. He definitely swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and Wade counts that as super weird. “You’ll stuff your face, I’ll stuff mine, and it’ll only sound dirty if you don’t already know what we’re talking about.” Nate keeps looking at the floor. “Okay, what? Was it the euphemism thing? Because that was a joke, from the old-German word for—”_ _

__“I already had lunch,” Nate interrupts._ _

__Wade— Okay, between the two of them, Wade’s definitely not the android who struggles with human communication, but he’s still pretty sure he misunderstood the words that just dropped out of Nate’s mouth. He frowns, and Nate raises his eyes. Not his head, not his chiseled man-chin, but just his very big, very thoughtful, very blue eyes._ _

__“You already ate,” Wade says, and Nate nods. “You ate. You ate, and then went and bought me a burrito because . . . ” He watches the other man shrug, this infuriating lift of his insane shoulders, and he finds himself waving a hand in the air. Twirling it, really, trying to coax more actual _words_ out of the guy. “What? You’re morally opposed to carrying cash? Your Burrito King gift card expired tomorrow and you needed to drain it? You’re seven bucks away from some really awesome reward on your Capital One card?”_ _

__Nate’s lips twitch up at that last one, but not in the warm, fizzy-bellied way from ten minutes ago. It looks almost shy, an emotion never-before associated with Nathan Mystery Middle Name Summers. “I needed to make a call.”_ _

__“So you drove ten minutes each way and bought a burrito?”_ _

__“People do sometimes make personal calls in their cars, Wilson.”_ _

__“People, sure, but not you.” Nate shrugs again, infuriatingly, and Wade seriously considers battering him with the paper bag. It’s only a crime if someone’s there to catch and arrest him, right? Otherwise, it’s just harmful and offensive touching no one ever needs to know about. “You close your door and put up a pissy do-not-disturb sign. Usually in Comic Sans, just because you know it’ll make Bobby want to burn the building down. You don’t climb in your car and go buy burritos.”_ _

__“I’m a man of many talents,” Nate replies casually. When Wade squints at him, he forces this little, almost unwelcome smile. “Enjoy your lunch,” he adds, and then walks away._ _

__Wade watches him go, his hands in his pockets and the line of his back entirely too tight and tense for a guy who just brought his work buddy a burrito; he leans out into the hallway to track his progress, but Nate simply walks into his office and shuts the door behind him. No hesitation, no looking back, _nothing_._ _

__Nate Summers, Wade decides, is a weird, weird man._ _

__A weird man who also ordered Wade’s favorite burrito to absolute perfection—right amount of beans, extra salsa, light on the sour cream, guacamole on the side. He’d ordered it so splendidly, in fact, that Wade only manages to eat half of it. The rest of the time, he just picks at it, pushing around the innards and spearing the big chunks of meat with his fork because—_ _

__Except there’s no reason, is there? There’s no answer to the gnawing feeling in his belly, no explanation for the strangeness that’s invaded his brain. There’s no need for a “because.”_ _

__Nate bought him an excellent burrito, and then turned back into an android._ _

__Wade makes sure he stays in his office until twenty full minutes after Nate heads home for the night. Just in case._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are not familiar with the ["they say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is" clip](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktephlDIY2Y) from the television show QI, you are missing out on something wonderful.
> 
> I am a behind on comments, as well as on creating a new MPU posting schedule. Just assume this schedule continues to be biweekly, and I will reply to comments in the next week. My personal life continues to be hectic, but will slow down soon, I promise!


	9. Mainstays in American Poetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade is reminded of two things. One of them is a poem from high school English that may or may not be instructive in his current situation. (Oh, who is he kidding? It’s totally instructive.) The other is an event that may or may not cause his death. Seriously. Just you wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Ace of Base song referenced by Wade in this chapter is [“Happy Nation.”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C9qBENqZMg)
> 
> Medieval Palace is loosely based on [Medieval Times](http://www.medievaltimes.com/). My memories of that place are vague at best, but the website suggests the shows are no different now than 15 years ago, when my English class took a field trip there. 
> 
> If you are unfamiliar with [Edible Arrangements](http://www.ediblearrangements.com/%22), well, you are missing out. On deliciousness.
> 
> Thanks to my always-patient, always-amazing betas, Jen and saranoh, who suffer through my tendency to turn non-legal words (e.g. "trail") into legal words (e.g. "trial"). Lawyer brain, man. It is the worst.

“You have two options,” Natasha Romanoff says, her hands on her very curvy hips and her sharp eyes narrowed seriously. “Either you tell me what’s going on, or I force it out of you.”

“Uh,” Wade replies, and misses his mouth when he tries to sip his water.

The splash of _cold_ registers somewhere in his lizard hindbrain, an immediate jolt out of whatever muddled, sticky mess presently resides in his skull and masquerades as his brain, and he swears under his breath. He ditches the paper cup on counsel table and grabs a napkin, but the damage’s already been done; the front of his blue dress shirt now looks like somebody peed on it, and his cheap black tie is slightly seeping dye. He probably should’ve washed it before wearing it. Instead, he strips it off, throws it onto his chair, and blots at his shirt.

“I spent two dollars on that one,” he complains. Natasha raises one perfect eyebrow. “I subscribe to the Macklemore theory of fashion,” he informs her, then snatches the napkins she offers out in front of her. When she keeps staring, he actually helps himself to a very long-suffering sigh. “Seriously? ‘I’m gonna pop some tags, only got twenty dollars in my pocket?’ It’s pretty much the internet’s favorite song, next to ‘Call Me Maybe.’”

Natasha rolls her eyes. Sexily, by the way. Everything she does is painfully sexy. He both really loves and hates that about her. On the one hand, _yowza_ and totally complimentary wolf-whistles, you know?

On the other hand, he really needs to focus on drying his shirt right now, not on the way her black, silky blouse shimmers when she crosses her arms under her breasts. Her magnificent, monument-worthy—

“You haven’t picked,” she says. 

He tosses the sodden napkins onto counsel table. Nope, shirt still looks like a victim of somebody’s freeballing infant. Awesome. “Picked what?” he asks, since he’s got absolutely no earthly idea what she’s talking about.

“Whether you’d prefer to explain why you’re extra-insane today on your own, or whether you’d like me extract it from you like a rotten tooth.”

Oh.

“Uh,” he says again, and watches as she rolls her eyes a second time.

They’re technically on lunch break for the trial, but here’s the greatest secret known to mankind (or at least, lawyer-kind): it’s super hard to eat when you’re in the middle of a trial. Sure, people manage to trudge their way down to the cafeteria and stuff their faces, but it’s _difficult_. Your stomach feels all twisted up in knots, your brain’s racing a thousand miles an hour, your arguments and witnesses and notes from your client are all still your responsibility to manage, and— Yeah. Like, who in the world can enjoy an undercooked chicken pot pie under that kind of pressure? Certainly not Wade.

And apparently not Natasha Romanoff, either, since she’s still watching him like she expects him to bolt right out of the courtroom.

“I’m not going to bolt right out of the courtroom,” he informs her, and gathers up the napkins to throw them away.

Look, intellectually, he knows that this trial with stupid freaking Leo-the-girlfriend-beater and his perpetually-drunk best friend—seriously, Weidner is sloppy as fuck and Wade hopes to hell that he manages a couple breath mints before climbing onto the stand after lunch—isn’t exactly his greatest foray into the wonderful world of the criminal justice system. He tripped over his opening in a couple different places, his tongue’s stuck on a bunch of easy questions, and at one point, he answered a question about his basis for objecting with, “Uh.” He’s skating really dangerously close to ineffectiveness, the kind where the disciplinary board’d probably wonder if _he_ was the sloppy drunk in the equation, but he can’t really help it.

His brain, man. It’s like somebody injected it with speed, the way it won’t stop running. The Energizer Bunny on steroids, or something, and all because of yesterday’s stupid carne asada burrito.

And because of his desperate and inexplicable need to lie in bed the night before and text Nate, _thx 4 the delishness_.

And because of Nate’s near-immediate, perfectly-punctuated reply: _I would say “any time,” but not if it subjects me to more of your atrocious spelling._

And because of Darcy stopping by the courtroom fifteen minutes before trial started, stretching up on her tip-toes, and kissing him good luck right in front of Natasha and his client and _literally everyone ever_.

He only realizes he’s staring blankly at the bottom of the courtroom garbage can when Natasha asks, “Wade?”

God, he is a fucking disaster area. He rubs his free hand—you know, the one without the napkins—over his face. He’s sporting just the barest touch of unprofessional stubble. Yeah, that’s right, Clint Barton’s sorry attempt at a goatee. Stubble is _unprofessional_. 

“Can this be the part of the story where I lie to you and tell you everything’s great, you believe me, and we continue to have a relationship that’s only ever unprofessional when I check out your legs in that skirt?”

When he glances over his shoulder at her, she’s glaring at him. She and Emma must’ve attended the same death-glare master class or something, because that is some _intense_ loathing bottled up in her expression. 

“No,” she answers.

“I figured,” he admits, and tosses the napkins into the garbage.

He drags fingers through his hair and then turns around to face the full fury of Natasha Romanoff’s super-serious expression. He admires Natasha. No, really, irrational and entirely impossible crush aside—she’s with a lady, remember, and even if she and Pepper broke up tomorrow, Wade’s still pretty sure he wouldn’t even make the rebound short list—he can’t help but think she’s all that and two bags of those really great kettle-cooked potato chips. Lady attorneys have it hard, but Natasha never wavers. More than that, she can read people like a book.

Case in point: their eyes meet across the courtroom, and her super-seriousness melts away. It softens like butter left out on the kitchen counter for cookie-baking purposes, and her lips tip into this frown that looks like, maybe, it might qualify as worried. As much as Natasha’d ever worry about a guy like Wade.

They’re not just batting for different teams, they’re in massively different leagues.

He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Have you, uh,” he starts to ask, but the words jumble in his stupid head. He shakes it, tries to clear the cobwebs, but the thing about webs of any sort (cob or otherwise) is that they’re sticky. They wrap around the syllables he wants, clinging on tight. When he realizes he can’t separate any of them out, he sort of heaves them into a corner and starts over again. “You ever read that poem with the guy in the wood?”

Natasha’s brow creases, and her maybe-worry shifts immediately into definite confusion. At least he knows how to deal with that kind of frown. “The poem,” she repeats, like he’d maybe spoken French or Cuban. Is Cuban a language? What about Calcuttan? Catalan?

“Yeah, you know,” he says, and she shakes her head a little. “A dude shows up in this wood. It’s yellow—not because of yellow snow or something, because of the sunlight through the trees and poetic imagery and shit—and he’s stuck a fork in the path. And to the left, the path’s all well-used and beaten down. Safe, you know? Like in the Oregon Trail, when— Well, no, you’re Russian, that one’s probably lost on you.”

“Wade,” she says. Her tone’s tight, like the arms still crossed over her chest. It occurs to him for a second that, in the last five minutes, Natasha’s broken the world record for the number of times super-hot redheads used his Christian name. He wonders whether he should call the Guinness Book people and let them know. 

She keeps staring him down, though, and he kind of huffs a breath. Not a sigh, but something more resigned. Like when somebody punches you in the gut and empties out your lungs on your behalf. “So, there’s the worn-down path,” he recaps, “but then there’s the other fork. It’s overgrown and everything, with grass sticking up. And the guy stands there, right at the fork, and he needs to decide. And before you think the whole metaphor’s worthless, lemme throw in that he’s not gonna end up back there, ‘cause—”

“‘Knowing how way leads to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.’” There’s something pretty in Natasha’s voice right then, lilting and lullaby-like. Wade thinks that, if she ever manages to pop out a red-headed baby, she’d at least do pretty good with the calming-to-sleep part of parenting. At least, until she breaks into the softness by adding, “I read Frost in high school like everyone else.”

“Right,” he says, and then he stands there. He stands there next to the witness stand and the mostly-empty garbage can, wearing his stupid damp shirt and no tie whatsoever, and he _thinks_. Because obviously, his brain is completely trustworthy and deserves a few moments of silence to remind him about Darcy’s tip-toe kiss and the surprise burrito lunch.

About Darcy on his couch and Nate at Chili’s with Mike the waiter.

About fire escapes and double-dates, about text messages and tiny chinks in android armor, about—

“The poem’s misleading,” Natasha says out of nowhere, and Wade jerks his head up to look at her. Her lips purse together, then release; they’re pink today, soft and supple, and he watches the color rush back into them. “The whole time, he suggests the two paths are equal, but they’re not. Not when taking the one made all the difference.”

Wade opens his mouth, but he realizes he’s not entirely sure what comes next in the conversation. ‘Cause yeah, okay, that whole “the overgrown path changed everything” part ate up three days of in-class discussion back in his high school English class, or whatever, but he’s not sure that’s the theme of _this_ conversation. Then again, he’s not sure what this conversation’s even about, anymore, or why he brought up the stupid poem in the first place.

Darcy’s not a fork in the road. She’s his girl-space-friend, though really, are spaces even necessary after sexy couch time and hallway kisses?

He forces himself to shrug, a thousand times more casual than he actually feels. “I’m pretty sure he would’ve been okay either way. Fork-guy, I mean.” 

“Except from the sound of it, you don’t want to end up ‘okay.’” He jerks his head up and over to where Natasha’s still standing next to counsel table, her arms still crossed under her fantastic, uhm, “argumentative assets.” He’s not sure what expression’s crossed his face, but her eyebrows lift because of it; when he swallows instead of saying anything, her arms tighten slightly.

He’d usually appreciate that gesture a lot more, but today is apparently not a usual day.

Especially since she follows it up by saying, “You were miserable at that party.”

Wade frowns. He’s sure it’s a frown because his whole face tightens, like Clint’s expression on an ordinary day. “Jane’s party?” he asks. Natasha nods. “The party where I was being accosted by an aged-up version of the Plastics from _Mean Girls_? Because I’m pretty sure even _you_ would’ve drowned yourself in orange juice and despair after talking to them for more than five minutes.”

When she tilts her head a few degrees, her curls sway. Wade sincerely hopes that her lady-friend spends a lot of time threading fingers through those wonderful red curls—and pinning her in place with them. But that part is for an entirely different kind of story. “And that’s all?”

“Uh, you saw them, right?” he asks. His hands roll around in the air, a Stark-style whirligig that might yet cause him to achieve flight. He’s not sure, of course, but he suspects. “Because I’m pretty sure if you Google Image the word ‘harpy,’ you actually get their high school yearbook pictures. Like, their chosen quotes were probably variations of all the nasty things Cersei says in _Game of Thrones_.” Natasha levels him a dubious look, and _god_. First Oregon Trail, now _Game of Thrones_? Wade is totally going to assemble a _Welcome to America, my red-headed Red Russian friend_ informational packet filled with pop culture references, because this is just turning _sad_. “My point,” he continues, because she’s still staring him down, “is that they were evil. Super-evil, even, and while I’m super-glad you saved me, that’s not really a symptom of what’s going on with me.”

“Then what’s actually going on with you?”

The follow-up question is so immediate, so perfectly and expertly timed, that Wade almost blurts an answer. He almost falls into the trap, but then he realizes that his tongue’s about to touch his teeth and he snaps his mouth shut. Natasha’s shoulders soften first, her expression following, and they’re left staring at one another: her, the fearless prosecutor who regularly reduces wife-beaters to tears, and him, the— Well. 

Him.

Wade Winston Wilson.

Practically pathetic in every way.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and glances at the floor, but he knows she’s watching. She watches like Carol and Emma watch—intent, interested, and other i-adjectives—but with the silence of Nate Summers. Nate, who needs to stop sneaking into Wade’s internal fucking monologue, because he and his shoulders are _not welcome_.

He grits his teeth together, grinding them until they almost hurt. He only realizes he’s glanced away from the floor when he’s met Natasha’s eyes all over again—and he only realizes how concerned Natasha looks when he feels his own body loosen and relax.

Wade remembers suddenly how long he’s known Natasha Romanoff, the first prosecutor he ever appeared opposite. She read him like a book that day, warned him about acting too much like a rookie, and then sauntered out of the room. His first real-life constructive criticism, delivered to him by a woman who looked _amazing_ in a pair of black slacks.

A woman who keeps staring him down, her face radiating very quiet worry.

He scrubs a hand over his face before finally answering, “I’m staring at two roads in a yellow wood.” He hears the way his voice stutters and hesitates, but the words pour out anyway. Like a waterfall, he thinks, plunging over the cliff thanks to gravity and the relentless march of _time_. “They’re there, they’re different, and I’m really, _crazy_ sorry that I can’t travel both.”

Natasha’s lips pop open, promising a sliver of white teeth and a hint of tongue, but Wade just shakes his head. He crosses the courtroom in record time, grabbing his still-wet tie first and his briefcase second. There’s another half-hour left to their lunch break, time he should spend prepping, but he needs—

He’s not sure what he needs.

Natasha keeps staring.

“I’m one guy,” he says, because he’s afraid of what’ll happen if she manages to snap back to her senses and find actual words. “I’m one guy, and I don’t know what happens once I pick.”

He’s almost all the way out of the courtroom—almost into the hallway, almost free as a bird (and always flying away)—when Natasha quietly replies, “You might be happy.” He hears it like an echo, the memory of a whisper on the wind, and he stops with his hand on the courtroom door.

Just for a second, though. His brain runs at a thousand miles an hour. He only ever really needs a single second.

“I’m pretty sure I’m never actually happy,” he replies, and pushes out the door to the least-free freedom he’s ever encountered.

 

==

 

“I’m too old for this,” Piotr Rasputin complains, and his girlfriend laughs before pelting him in the side of the head with a snowball. 

Frigid February Saturdays, Wade thinks, might very well be a master work of nature, though he’s pretty sure he stole that phrase from something he read back in high school. Either way, the sky’s a brilliant blue peppered with the occasional fluffy white cloud, the sun is streaming and glinting off the snowfall of the last two days, and the wind that whips through the trees lifts flurries that dance around them like something out of Disney’s _Fantasia_. Most under-rated Disney film in the whole collection, by the way. In case you wondered about that, and really, he knows you did.

It’s the kind of day where kids press their noses to the window and beg to play outside despite the wind chill. And, if you’re in your mid-to-late twenties, it’s the kind of day where—

“Are you seriously just standing there _holding_ my saucer sled?” Darcy demands, and Wade blinks out of his stupid, meandering thoughts to stare down at her. She looks like Nanook of the North’s hobo cousin, wearing shiny silver track pants, an overstuffed neon-pink parka, and earmuffs over her ridiculous floppy knit hat. Her sparkly-yarned scarf, tied Sherlock-style, completes the ridiculous ensemble. That, and the purple-gloved hand that hangs in the air between them.

Wade grasps it with his free hand—the other one is, in fact, holding a cheap plastic saucer sled they picked up at Wal-Mart that morning. Darcy smacks him in the arm and he laughs, his breath rising up in a puff of white steam. “If I told you I was planning to try to trade up to Sam’s plastic toboggan?”

“I’d say you were full of _shit_ , bro!” Sam announces, and promptly takes off down the hill with a hoot of delight.

Darcy cocks her head in her very best _I would snap in a z-formation if my gloves would allow it_ expression. Wade tries to roll his eyes at her, but he betrays the whole thing by grinning. He can’t actually stop grinning today, blame it on the Monster he drank for breakfast or the brilliance of a cold morning. 

Behind Darcy, Piotr’s dragging his sled up the hill with one hand; the other holds Kitty over his shoulder like you’d expect from a caveman. She wriggles and kicks a little, but Piotr’s ridiculously tall compared to Little Miss Petite and Wily, and his only response is to chuckle. How an art museum something-or-other ended up with a tiny, snarky future lawyer, Wade’s not entirely sure, but they’re pretty cute.

Speaking of tiny, snarky future lawyers, Darcy slips her hand out of her glove and then sticks it out in front of Wade’s face, all demanding-like. He leans forward, teeth bared, and she presses her index finger to the tip of his nose. “Sled, Wilson.”

“Cabinet, Lewis,” he replies. She frowns at him, her eyes turning all squinty in confusion. He likes her without her glasses; it reminds him how big and brown her eyes are, never mind her long, girly lashes. “What? I thought we were just pairing nouns with last names. You know: dog food, Rasputin. Care Bear, Pryde. Actually, ‘Care Bear Pride’ sounds like some new move the bears use to defeat hate and sadness everywhere, we should—”

“Oh my god, you are the literal worst!” Darcy declares, and before Wade can track her—and she’s not hard to track with the bright pink coat—she’s wrenched the sled out of one hand, stolen _his_ glove out of his pocket, and charged up the last ten feet of the hill to join Kitty for another race to the bottom.

The bottom where Sam’s spread-eagled twenty feet from his sled, proof that trying to conquer the hill at full speed was an egregious, disastrous mistake.

All-in-all, Wade decides as he’s standing there, watching Piotr hold up his scarf as a starting flag for Darcy and Kitty’s race, the week’s turned out pretty okay. He survived his trial against Natasha, successfully arguing the charge of aggravated domestic battery all the way down to _normal_ domestic battery—which, okay, not an award-winning victory, but the state’d sort of grasped at straws in charging something so high and the guy really needed a hardcore restraining order entered against him, not prison time—and worked through a huge pile of those _stupid_ forms for Emma’s _stupid_ project. Alone, because Nate’d muttered something about “personal time” before disappearing promptly at five on Friday afternoon, but it’s not like Wade needed him. Really, they only ever worked parallel to one another anyway, splitting food and sniping at each other, pretending to derive joy from one another’s company when—

A shriek cuts through the park, and Wade jerks his head up just in time to watch Kitty and Darcy collide and tumble off their respective sleds in literal screams of laughter. They sprawl in the middle of the hill, shoving at one another, a spectacle that coaxes a grin out of Wade. Just one grin, though, because when he glances back down at his hands, he realizes he’s holding onto his cell phone, idly scrolling through messages that are entirely irrelevant to a Saturday morning out with his girl-space-friend and the rest of their trivia team.

He returns to the home screen right around the time someone nudges his arm, and he glances over at a delicious eyeful of Rasputin shoulder. He decides that he needs to surrender himself to a higher power—the first step in dealing with shoulder addiction is to recognize he _has_ a shoulder addiction, right—and then snaps his gaze up to Piotr’s face. Piotr’s one of those guys who probably decorates in a thousand colors but dresses in about three, and everything about him is gray, black, or silver: his scarf, his coat, his knit cap, his smile. Well, okay, technically smiles aren’t a color, but Wade thinks of his smile _like_ silver, bright and smooth. “I keep thinking I’m going to break a leg,” Piotr comments, and Wade realizes that he’s just jumped into the middle of an ongoing conversation. He wishes he’d heard the first part. “I’m not nineteen, any more.”

“Technically, none of us are nineteen,” Wade points out, but then he pauses. Because even next to Darcy, Kitty’s _tiny_ , and— “Wait. Is she actually nineteen? Like, is this a thing? Because I thought she said you guys met back when she was in undergrad, but that would’ve made her, like, _fifteen_ , and I’m pretty sure—”

Piotr cuts him off with a bark of laughter and shakes his head. When Wade’d first met him, back when the Learned Hand Jobs still referred to themselves as Reversal on the Merits and sported really boring t-shirts, he’d thought he’d had his sense of humor surgically removed at birth or something. Not because Piotr acted like a jerk, but because he seemed broody and wore a lot of black cardigans. But then, one night, Kitty’d coaxed him into a couple apple pie shots and he’d morphed into this really open, really funny human being.

Turned out, the guy just happened to be the type who sucks around strangers. Wade’s never experienced that—he’s always freaking amazing, in case you might not have noticed—but he sort of understands. A little. He’s friends with Nate Summers and Clint Barton, after all.

He’s abruptly aware of the fact that his stupid phone’s still in his stupid hand, so he shoves it in the pocket of his coat and sticks his hands in his pants pockets, just in case. He assumes he’s sneaky about the whole thing, too, but then Piotr asks, “Everything all right?”

Wade feels his whole face flare pink, but at least a convenient gust of wind functions as the universe’s best cover. “I’m always all right,” he answers, and glances over in time to catch the other guy grinning at him. “But I gotta know: is this a Russian thing? Like, is part of your humorless training focused on squinting at people and finding their weaknesses?”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not sure either,” Wade admits, and forces himself to look back down the hill. Darcy and Kitty are wrestling Sam for control of the plastic toboggan, a blur of pink parka, green ski jacket, and whatever the hell that brown-and-white monstrosity Sam’s wearing qualifies as. Wade’s pretty sure _ugliest thing ever_ isn’t actually a category of outerwear. “Lemme ask you something.”

He swears he can feel Piotr shrug. “Sure.”

“You and Kitty’ve been together since she was a fresh-faced undergrad and you were a seductive whatever-you-were, right?” Piotr chuckles, a little break of warmth against the deep and abiding February cold. Down the hill, his girlfriend shrieks with laughter as Sam pelts her in the shoulder with a snowball. Darcy, meanwhile, starts escaping with the sled. “How’d you know?”

“Know what?”

“Know she was— I don’t know. Like, out of all the thousand hot girls at college, slobbering over your arms, how’d you know Kitty was the one you wanted to stick with? How’d you decide to rescue iguanas and shit with her?” When Wade finally raises his eyes enough to look over, Piotr’s staring at him. It’s not an unkind look or anything, no malice in it, but _man_ he looks extra crispy thoughtful. Wade rolls his eyes. “C’mon, there’s no way you didn’t know you’re a walking Russian wet-dream, I’m not even dignifying that look with an answer.”

The corner of Piotr’s mouth lifts into a nearly-imperceptible smile. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I heard you thinking it.”

“You’ll need to teach me that trick.” Wade rolls his eyes, even tries on a huffy rush of breath for good measure—like he’s put out, because it’s either that or admitting that Piotr’s kind of sneaky-charming—but he knows the distraction fails miserably. Especially since, the second he glances back at the other guy, he lifts his shoulders in another tiny shrug. “The question didn’t sound like you.”

“You hardly know me,” Wade points out.

“I know you well enough,” Piotr returns, and Wade’s suddenly sad he wasted his one eye-roll this scene faking it, because _that_ line earned the derision, “and I didn’t think you worried about those sorts of things. At least, not when it comes to Darcy.”

As if on some weirdly twisted cue, Darcy’s voice shrieks through the late-morning air, and Wade twists his head around just in time to witness Sam dragging her by her boot down the hill. She’s laughing at smacking at him, Kitty’s readying another snowball, and it’s all suddenly very _normal_ , the antics of twenty-something kids acting their age.

Wade’s no older than them, really, but he feels forty.

“I thought you two were just having fun,” Piotr continues, and Wade drags his attention away from the battle royale at the bottom of the hill to watch the other man’s face. “Friends with benefits. Or, as Darcy and Kitty would say—”

“‘Superfriends,’” Wade supplies with him, and Piotr cracks a smile. “I like sounding like I should be wearing a cape every time I get to second base with her.”

“Or a skin-tight leather ensemble,” Piotr suggests. Wade pulls some kind of monumentally awesome face, complete with a horrified full-body snap-back, and the guy laughs at him. “Or not,” he amends, still chuckling.

Wade considers a snowball to the face on principle, but then he remembers Piotr’s huge body and decides against it. Especially since the guy’s using that body for another nonchalant shrug. “I knew after the first time things got hard,” he says after a few more seconds, his gaze wandering down to where Kitty and Darcy have finally cornered Sam with a crazy-quick snowball onslaught. “We fought over something ridiculous—her roommate didn’t want me spending the night without prior notice, and I had the gall to agree instead of being righteously indignant on Kitty’s behalf—and she wouldn’t talk to me for a week.” He shakes his head. “I spent the whole week like a lost puppy. Checking my phone, wandering by the buildings she had classes in just to catch a glimpse—very _To Catch a Predator_ , actually.” He cracks a smile, obviously expecting Wade to burst out laughing, but Wade’s face barely twitches. No, instead, Wade can’t stop watching him, can’t stop tracking all the honesty that Piotr Rasputin wears like the greatest body armor in the world.

Some people hide behind bawdy jokes or serious resting faces. Some are so wholesome that you want to throw up in your mouth. Piotr is strong, soft-spoken, and honest.

Wade wishes he knew how to pull that one out of his hat.

“I missed her,” Piotr continues, and Wade jerks back into the moment just in time to catch the other guy watching him. He watches closely, like he expects Wade to bolt or maybe just suddenly plaster all his emotions on his face. That last one’s the most unlikely; he’s not King Clint of Transparent Feelstopia, after all. “On every level, I just missed her.”

Wade rolls his lips together and nods, a little. “But mostly on the sexy levels, right?” he asks after a couple extra seconds, and Piotr snorts at him. “It’s okay, we’re almost bros—technically, we’re Hand Job bros, which are the most bro of all possible bros—so I think it’s cool if you admit that what you missed the _most_ was—”

“Time for sledding!” a voice suddenly announces, and before Wade can coax the answer out of Piotr—the clear _yes_ answer, by the way, because did you see that smirk crawling onto his broody artistic Russian face?—a hand grips Wade’s arm and jerks him right out of the conversation. Literally and figuratively, because he swallows a mouthful of frigid February air in his attempt to yelp for help and then almost trips down the hill. In front of him, her hair damp and her hat crooked, Darcy turns around for the express purpose of staring him down. “You’re not spending the whole morning gossiping with Piotr like a teenage girl.”

“Don’t besmirch the name of teenage girls everywhere by comparing them to us!” Wade objects, and Darcy twists up her face at him. It’s like a corkscrew or a spiral, her nose wrinkled and her full lips all curved up and—you know, go ahead and imagine the rest, it’s cool with him. It’s also totally unimpressed. “We were gossiping like men. Manly-men. No Auntie Annie’s pretzels or Orange Julius required.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “I swear, I only ever date jackasses or crazy people,” she decides, and tosses Sam’s plastic toboggan down at their feet. It starts to slide away, but she steps on the rope handle and stops it. When she looks back up at him, there’s something wild and unfamiliar in her eyes. 

Half-feral, Wade thinks, but he likes half-feral. 

“Which one am I?” he asks for lack of a better follow-up.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she replies, and kisses him.

It’s brief but warm, a burst of heat in the iciness of the late morning, and Wade only realizes that his hands are balled up into fists when she wraps her fingers around one of them and pulls him down toward the ground. He imagines briefly that life’s turned into a weird Jack Frost pornography, but once his ass hits hard plastic he realizes that, nope, he’s just being forced to a sled with his girlfriend. Girl-space-friend. The person he sexes up on the regular and really enjoys kissing. 

Whatever. 

He arranges his legs so Darcy can climb on in front of him, and that’s what he focuses on the whole time they’re getting situated (and yelling at Sam to stop sulking about losing out on the toboggan and _get out of the damn way_ ): Darcy’s kisses, Darcy’s scent, Darcy’s nearness, Darcy’s hair. He obsesses over the softness of her hips where his legs press against her and the way her fingers curl around his ankle until she’s all tucked up. He turns her mere existence into the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, the last thread of his sanity.

And if he digs his fingers extra-hard into the snow, it’s definitely to keep them from plunging down the hill too early. It’s absolutely not related to the fact that he only really checks his cell phone for messages from one person anymore, or _misses_ one person anymore, or—

“You ready?” Darcy asks, curls tumbling over her shoulder and a grin blooming on her face like a totally unseasonable spring blossom.

“Probably not,” Wade admits, and she laughs at him as he lifts his hands and lets gravity pull them down the hill, full speed ahead.

 

==

 

“Please tell me you’re working on a Wednesday night so your respective blow-up dolls won’t be upset with you on Friday,” Carol says, reaching for Wade’s personal pan pizza.

Wade smacks her hand hard enough that she yelps a little and tries to claw him. “Please, like a blow-up doll could survive five minutes with Mister Man Mountain,” he retorts, and Nate Summers freaking _laughs_. Seriously. The one human person voted least likely to ever enjoy anything laughs openly and freely, and Wade suddenly feels very positive about the whole entire world.

Objectively, there is absolutely nothing worth feeling positive about. Both Monday and Tuesday qualified uniquely as enormous shit-shows, filled to the brim with client meetings, motions to file, futile ten-minute court appearances (and way to earn a bench warrant there, aggravated robbery guy), and an endless backlog of e-mails that still mock Wade from his ancient laptop. His ancient laptop that, by the way, is balanced on the corner of Nate’s desk, displaying both his Outlook and the office Dropbox because, apparently, _pro se_ litigation forms wait for no man. 

He pops a piece of pineapple from his pizza into his mouth instead of working, though, and watches Nate finally straighten up from his head-thrown-back, joy-to-the-world guffaw. There’s light in his eyes, and he flashes teeth at Carol. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Wade forces himself to eat his damn pizza.

It’s two days too early to be eating dinner with Nate, a privilege (and curse) usually reserved for Friday nights, but Emma’d had other ideas. In fact, Emma’d swanned into the conference room during the usual office lunchtime ritual of creating ridiculous dialogue to go with a muted episode of _Young and the Restless_ and promptly turned off the television.

“Hey!” Bobby’d complained, breaking his horrible-but-perfect portrayal of Diego, the secretly-straight gardener who was attempting to seduce his very rich boss for his money (or so their version of the story went). “We were watching that.”

“You were defiling it, maybe,” Emma’d returned. She’d dropped her hands to her hips and sent Bobby a murderous glance. Bobby, like the not-entirely-stupid person he claimed to be, immediately dropped his eyes to the tabletop and shut the hell up. “I need to talk to Wilson and Summers.”

“Us?” Wade’d asked. He’d pointed between Nate and himself, because, well, Nate’d stolen the chair next to him when he’d walked into the room and, asshole that he was, then refused to return it. After, of course, three minutes of bickering and Nate’s very dramatic attempt to push, kick, and dump Wade’s foot off said chair. Which was maybe why Wade’d put his foot on Nate’s thigh at first, to prove a point.

Emma’s eyes had narrowed like she wanted to light them on fire. Wade’d snapped his foot back down onto the floor so fast, it’d hurt.

“It’s about your project,” she’d said, her voice strung up tight. When Wade’d glanced over at Nate, Nate’d swallowed a huge chunk of apple without chewing. It’d kind of impressed him. Like one of those snakes that could swallow woodchucks whole, or whatever.

Of course, it’d turned out that the tension in Emma’s voice was just a side effect of her speaking at all, and that the only change in the project was a couple additional forms thanks to the supreme court changing some shit at the last second of the eleventh hour. But believe Wade: for a second there, he’d figured he was screwed.

And not in the good way, either. Definitely not, especially since—

“What about one of those creepy love pillows?” Carol asks, licking hot wing sauce off her fingers. Wade glares at Nate on principle, because those are _their_ hot wings, not for sharing with crazy air force captains who occasionally invade Wade’s worst nightmares.

“ _Never_ ,” Nate returns, and Carol busts out laughing.

So, yeah, it’s Wednesday night and instead of sitting at home with a beer and a truly epic episode of _Duck Dynasty_ , Wade’s here, in Nate’s office, listening to Nate and Carol laugh while he picks at his pizza and considers working on the forms they’re supposed to be completing. Don’t get him wrong or anything, he wants to work on them, but he also sort of wants to enjoy this moment, you know? He wants to watch Nate’s eyes crinkle in laughter and Carol suck wing sauce off her thumb, and all without worrying about stupid poems written by mainstays in American literature. Right now, that’s actually pretty easy. It’s so easy, in fact, that he starts to feel like he hallucinated the paths and the yellow wood.

Yeah, actually, maybe that’s it. Maybe he created his own weird desert mirage, only instead an oasis with pretty brown-skinned girls dressed like Princess Jasmine or the hot god guy from the _Prince of Egypt_ , his brain created a fork in the road. A flirty, burrito-bringing, uninvited distraction from the yellow wood and the clear path laid out in front of him.

That totally made sense, right?

Right?

“What about you?” Nate’s asking, and Wade only jerks back into the conversation in time to slap Carol’s hand again. She scowls at him and tries to grind her heel into the toe of his shoe, but he pulls his foot out of the way. He grins when she teeters, though less when the teeter nearly lands her in his lap. Either way, Nate’s watching the two of them, his eyebrows raised and curiosity etched on his face like you’d expect from a little kid. “You must have plans.”

“Yeah, with a bottle of merlot once my neighbors’ kid crashes.” Carol flops into the empty chair next to Wade and swings her feet up on the desk. Nate rolls his eyes, clearly just for show, and Wade kind of grins. Carol’s adversarial with everybody, sure, but sometimes he figures she picks on Nate just to prove some sort of weird, alpha-dog point. Which is stupid, because Emma’s clearly the alpha of their pack. “It’s one of the two nights a year I’ll actually sit for them. Delays the pity party.”

Nate chuckles at that. He’s in a good mood, all jokey and warm. Wade secretly prefers this Nate over all the others. Hey, trust him, there are others, and they are all super cranky. “You could date, I’m sure,” he notes.

Carol’s face splits into the creepiest Joker-grin Wade’s ever seen. “You offering?”

“Oh, I doubt I’d survive.”

“Well,” Wade cuts in, drawing the word out past its boundaries and then some. They both glance at him, Nate’s lips still curled into the barest hint of a smirk. “I mean, things being what they are, or whatever, I’d just like to say that if there’s a Carol-shaped sword that needs falling on here, I could—”

“No,” they both answer in unison. Carol even adds a dramatic full-body shudder to the mix, which makes Nate snort a laugh. “Besides,” Carol adds after she’s settled back in her chair, “isn’t the reason you’re here tonight to keep your girlfriend from killing you?”

“Something I would assume is more likely to occur when she finds out that you’ve offered Carol your ‘sword,’” Nate adds. It is exactly the opposite of helpful, but at least his voice lifts at the end. He’s very proud of his own jokes, tonight. 

Wade’s not really complaining.

“One,” he retorts in his very best not-complaining voice, which consists mostly of pointing a finger roughly in Nate’s direction and waving it around, “it’s _Carol’s_ sword, not my own.” Nate raises an eyebrow, and Carol, graceful and elegant as she is, chokes on her own spit and nearly falls off the damn chair. Nate’s eyebrow hitches up even higher after that performance, and Wade rolls his eyes. “Google it or something if you don’t already know, because that’s a set of mechanics that requires props for demonstration.”

Carol lets out some moaning sound of horror, something long and low, but for some reason he can’t entirely explain, Wade keeps his eyes on the man across the desk. He thinks maybe it’s a mistake, watching Nate so intently—the way his tongue sweeps across his full lips, for instance, or the darkness in the eyes that never flick away from Wade’s face—but he sort of can’t look away. Like the whole world’s narrowed all of a sudden to the five feet between them and absolutely nothing else.

At least, until Carol kicks the desk hard enough that everything on it jumps. Wade’d missed her swinging her feet down, but he totally catches the unimpressed expression that sweeps across his face. He shifts his weight around, Nate sort of coughs into his fist, and—

“And two,” Wade continues, picking a piece of pineapple off his pizza and then gesturing with it between his fingers, “I am here because Emma upped the ante and losing this job means I can no longer afford to keep myself in frozen taquitos and straw-ber-itas.”

He punctuates the statement by popping the pineapple into his mouth, but something super weird happens right then: the room suddenly falls quiet. Not normal-quiet, either, but pin-drop quiet, the kind of quiet where you wonder whether the apocalypse is about to happen. Or worse, it’s the rapture, and you’re all of ten seconds from watching everybody you know blink out of existence and up into heaven.

Come on. You’re not actually naïve enough to think that he, Wade Winston Wilson, will make the “first saved” cut, right? Because he’s totally “left behind” material, ready to fight the crazy fire-and-brimstone angels or whatever. Trust him; he _knows_.

Whatever the case, he swallows the pineapple without tasting it while Carol and Nate stare at him. Carol’s jaw twitches and sets, like she’s trying to make a very difficult decision. Wade knows that face because he’s seen it twitch into place a million times with clients—and, actually, with her part-timer who she actively hates.

Wade braces himself for impact, but when her mouth opens, she just asks, “This isn’t about Friday?” 

He frowns at her. “No,” he answers, and watches her blink at him. It’s cartoony, like she belongs on one of those old Fox Kids shows he watched back in elementary school. You know, before his mom left and life turned promptly to shit on a cracker. “What?” he demands, because Carol’s still gaping. “What’s Friday?”

Across the desk, Nate exhales slowly. “You have no idea, do you?”

“No idea about what?” Wade demands. He’s starting to feel a little panicky, now, like an animal backed into a very tight corner. Nate manages to keep the shock off his face, and instead just looks— Disappointed, maybe? It’s not quite surprise, but something softer. Parents use that face, Wade thinks. Parents who expect their kid not to punch someone at recess or wet themselves at daycare. Parents who fill themselves up with hopes and dreams and then watch their kid crush those dreams like particularly oozy bugs. “Is this a joke? Is there some weird inter-office significance to February 13 that I missed in the handbook? Because you know I didn’t read that thing, right? It was like forty-five pages, tiny font, and—”

“Fourteenth,” Nate interrupts, totally calmly. Wade snaps his face over in that direction and then just stares at him, blank-faced. That’s got to be the right reply, all clueless and empty. The problem is, his stomach disagrees. Because instead of hopping right on board the idiot expression, his gut churns and twists around under his skin. He wants to blame the pizza grease or the hot wings, maybe the energy drink he stole from the fridge downstairs, but he’s never struggled with that one before. 

The pizza and shitty food, that is, not with his body breaking whenever he’s in spitting distance of Nathan Summers. No, he’s starting to grow used to that.

He swallows around the thick feeling in the back of his throat. “What?” he asks. His voice sounds super sandpapery. 

“Friday is February 14,” Nate replies.

And Carol monumental shit that she is (and ever shall be), grins from ear to ear and back again before adding, “You know, Valentine’s Day.”

Wade’s not entirely sure what happens to his face in the next five seconds, but he knows it causes Carol to burst out in the kind of hysterical laughter reserved for over-tired three-year-olds and the hyenas from _The Lion King_. He tries to control it, to step on whatever horrible battle of embarrassment and horror is currently playing out across his features, but he fails. He fails miserably, an embarrassment to stoic lawyers everywhere, but he really cannot help it. Because Friday isn’t just another day, filled with work and form-proofing and Nate’s newfound sunny disposition. No, Friday is a day that will live in infamy, a day that will cause his untimely demise, a day that they will discuss for generations because he is so incredibly fucked.

“You are so _incredibly_ fucked!” Carol declares, and her cackling echoes all through the office.

After that, Wade seriously loses all concept of time and space, because he’s picturing his slow and painful death at Darcy’s hands. He imagines it like a _Saw_ movie, one different form of torture after another, forced to chew his arm off only to be subjected to a scenario like in that Edgar Allen Poe story, the one with the slowly-descending blade and the painful knowledge that, yeah, he will be sliced in half, but nice and gradually.

“Wade,” a voice in his head says, and it sounds a little like Death from the Discworld books might sound, slinking down to sit on his shoulder and stay a while. Shut up, he knows that Death in the books is the size of a normal person, but the imagery’s a lot better if you think of him as a tiny, crouched skeleton-person—crouching Death, hidden murder, maybe?—who whispers in to your ear when your time’s come.

His certainly has. Snowy sledding kisses and sharing a mug of hot cocoa at Kitty and Piotr’s will never in a million years make up for forgetting the biggest couple holiday of all couple holidays. Which they are. Right? They’re not so casual that they can just ignore it, especially since—

“Wade,” Death repeats.

—they’ve started spending more downtime together, and since Darcy’s now left his apartment with her bra in her pocket the one time, and since she kissed him in the hallway outside of Judge English’s courtroom and, yesterday, texted him the color and cut of her—

“ _Wade_ ,” Death insists.

“Shut up, I’m thinking!” Wade snaps back, and realizes as he jerks his head up from his lap that the person speaking isn’t Death at all, but Nate.

The office is empty now, devoid of Carol’s cackling laughter or, really, any sound, and Wade suspects that the little flicker that crosses Nate’s face is the tail end of a flinch. He’s pretty sure Nate’s never flinched before in his life—or at least, not as long as Wade’s known him—and Wade feels color immediately flood his entire face. Darcy will literally murder him in forty-eight hours, sure, and leave his body in a vat of lye, but he definitely shouldn’t compound all that by being a shithead to Nate.

He needs somebody to avenge him when he dies, or whatever.

He rubs a hand over his face and mutters an apology, but it’s drowned out by Nate asking, “What does she like?” Out of the blue, too, like Wade’s missed twelve steps in the logical progression of the conversation. He drops his hand into his lap and stares. A puzzled stare, apparently, because Nate leans back in his chair a few inches. “Darcy,” he clarifies. “What does she like?”

“Besides murdering people who first run out after sex and then forget Valentine’s Day?” Wade retorts without thinking. Obviously without thinking, because who the fuck admits _that_ one to a guy who definitely isn’t Clint Barton (the only friend who might ever understand the depth and breadth of Wade’s fucked up soul, which is why he figures they get along so well)? He considers burying his face in his hands and crawling out of the room on his knees—you know, therefore saving the remaining shreds of his dignity, and whatever—but he’s not sure he trusts himself not to just end the misery by throwing himself down the stairs.

Worse, Nate’s not saying a _word_. No bleat of confusion, no questions, not a proverbial peep from the other guy. He’s not smiley, funny, happy-go-lucky Nate anymore but the Nate Wade not-so-secretly cannot stand, the Nate who lost his emotion chip in the first great robot-mutant parakeet war and now must operate with the appearance of a man but the heart of a machine. He’s impassive and stony, a perfect lawyer, and Wade _hates_ him.

It’s this irrational ball of ire that clenches in the pit of his stomach spreads outward, an unstoppable flesh-eating virus or a crazy cancer. He wants to leap across the desk and shake Nate, to demand how one human being can so embody a Katy Perry song (because he’s hot and cold, yes and no, in and out, up and down) and still _exist_ , to find an answer for why Wade simultaneously feels like he’s flying and drowning when he’s within ten feet of the stupid silver-haired bastard.

But he likes his job. He likes his friends, his clients, his personal pan pizza, and sometimes, maybe even Nate himself.

He slumps in his seat and rubs his palm over his face a second time, trying to fight down all the urges he can’t name, when Nate asks, very quietly, “What are her hobbies?”

“Devouring the souls of all who cross her.”

“Wade.”

He snaps the word like a whip, and Wade groans. He lets his hands fall to his side, dangling over the arms of the chair, and he forces himself to stare at the ceiling. Eye contact means that the urge to reach over and throttle Nate might actually overtake him, and Wade’s not in the mood to defend himself against battery charges. Or, worse, to bear responsibility for anything else he might do once he’s in arm’s length of the asshole. “Geek stuff,” he answers. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches Nate waving a hand, a tiny _go on_ motion that causes him to roll his eyes. “ _Doctor Who_. Ponies. Living by the creed ‘what would Daenerys Targaryen do?’ After a long day, comfy jammies and a young adult novel.” He closes his eyes. The pattern from the fluorescent lights dances in the darkness. “To name a few.”

Nate hums in appreciation. At least, Wade assumes that it’s appreciation. Maybe consideration, actually, or some other word used in that one Ace of Base song. The point is, Nate hums for a second, and then follows it up by saying, “So give her that.”

“Oh my fucking— Do you actually listen to yourself when you talk, or do you have some special ‘my own bullshit’ filter that pops up when you open your mouth?” Wade snaps his head down to stare at Nate. The guy feels like a stranger all of a sudden, like the mean personality that seriously no one in the universe can stand just popped back up and took over. He also watches Wade with this weird calmness that Wade wants to smack right off his smug, square jaw. “Because you cannot possibly think it’s really that easy to turn _that_ into a Valentine’s Day gift in the next forty-eight hours.”

Nate shrugs, just the barest lift of shoulders, and glances down at his keyboard. He’s not typing—work’s sort of a long-forgotten thing of the past, thanks to the Gregorian calendar and a saint nobody actually cares about—but he’s definitely glancing away. Hiding his eyes, Wade realizes, and he suddenly feels monumentally guilty about turning into a giant asshole.

This isn’t Nate’s fault, after all.

It’s no one’s fault, really, except his own stupid brain and—

“The medieval palace holds jousting events every night of the week, and they’re almost never sold out.” Every word steps gingerly off Nate’s tongue, painfully deliberate in its punctuation and presentation, and Wade finds himself staring at the top of his spiky silver head. “Combine that with your tendency to build blanket forts with or without her, and—”

“Hey,” Wade interrupts, and levels a finger in Nate’s direction. The other guy raises his head, and for a second, their eyes meet; Nate’s all crazy-bright and sort of impossible, Wade’s hopefully hiding all the pent-up embarrassment and guilt that’s still coursing through his bloodstream. “Do not make me regret telling you about the Fortress of Pillowtude, Summers.”

He can’t see Nate’s mouth, the way the computer monitors are set up, but he totally catches the crinkle of all the wrinkles around Nate’s eyes. It’s brief, but the tension in Wade’s stomach loosens immediately. At least, sort of. “My point,” Nate continues, “is that you’re creative and you care about her. You can make it special.”

“Yeah,” Wade agrees. He tries to smile, but he feels the way it falters and slips. Nate must notice, too, because he nods a little before looking back at the computer screen and then, wordlessly, staring to type. Wade’s not entirely sure what’s left for Nate to _do_ , really—most the forms are waiting on Wade to test-drive and proofread them, a far cry from Mr. Flash Fingers’s programming prowess—but he dives right in, anyway.

Wade wonders whether it’s an avoidance tactic.

Which leads him to wonder whether he’s ever witnessed Nate avoiding _anything_ else before tonight.

It’s an hour and a half later when Wade stops in the middle of a child support worksheet, glances across the desk, and says, “I’m sorry for being a dick.”

Nate’s fingers freeze on the keyboard. The room’s tomb-quiet without the clicking—Carol, after all, had stopped by to point and laugh at Wade before heading home, and Bobby’s out at some cute little wholesome hubby date night extravaganza—and Wade immediately misses the noise. He misses something to break the intensity of eye contact, or the way his whole body feels itchy when Nate’s laugh lines crinkle for a half-second.

“You forgot Valentine’s Day, and your girlfriend’s role model is the mother of dragons,” he replies casually. “I think I can let it slide this one time.”

“At least it narrows down the ways she’ll kill me if I fuck it up,” Wade returns, and god, he’s glad to hear Nate’s chuckle.

 

==

 

“You,” Darcy declares, dragging Wade down onto the air mattress that’s covering most of his living room floor, “are _awesome_.”

Darcy’s long, flowy gown that Wade’s pretty sure once served as a “sexy bar wench” Halloween costume is crumpled on the floor in the bedroom, and— No! Stop it! Not like that, okay? Because yes, his knee is currently shoved between her thighs, and yes, he’s kissing her long and lazy, the kind of kiss that requires fingers in her curls and his body all lined up with her, but it’s on the floor from her _changing clothes_ , not from him stripping her.

Because he’s wearing Family Guy Christmas pajama pants and a long-sleeved thermal t-shirt, and Darcy’s dressed in a pair of ridiculous purple-checked flannel jammies he picked her out at Target. Really baggy on her, too, because he’d assumed she’d want space enough in the chest to actually breathe, and it means they pool around her feet and ankles like a fuzzy pond.

She’d squealed about them, though. Actually, she’d squealed about everything: the dress code he’d set up (“Think Ren Faire, but less cleavage,” he’d informed her, meaning she showed up with all the cleavage in the universe and a dress that bunched in at the hips in the world’s best way), the surprise of Medieval Palace, the dinner that required they eat with their bare hands, and the pricy photo op where Darcy sat on the winning knight’s lap after the show. She’d mauled him in the doorway to his apartment for that last one—not just buying the picture, either, but “letting that guy grope my thigh and _laughing_ about it, thank god you are not a possessive asshole!”—and he’d peeled himself out of the kiss long enough to spin her around and point her toward the living room. Well, okay, the living-and-dining-rooms-with-the-kitchen attached, but whatever. He pointed her in the right direction, flipped on the light switch, and revealed phase two of his plan: a giant blanket-and-pillow fortress with an air mattress floor, and white Christmas lights strung up all along the walls. Like a fairy den, he’d thought, but then Darcy’d kissed him so hard and hungry that he’d forgotten about the pajamas and the complete Blu-Ray collection of the Christopher Nolan _Batman_ movies he’d dragged out for them to watch.

“Really?” Darcy’d asked as she wandered into Wade’s bedroom, the pajamas under her arm. She’d started unstringing her bodice right in the middle of the doorway, too, and Wade’d worked hard not to look. Not because he didn’t want to, mind you, but because the whole “lazy movie night on the floor” might be ruined by him hiking up her skirt and—

You get the idea.

“Are you complaining about Batman?” Wade’d demanded. “Because my only retort to that, by the way, is _it’s Batman_ , which renders all your arguments irrelevant and stupid.”

Her laughter’d trickled through the whole apartment, and Wade’d felt all the horribleness of the last two days sort of wash away, just from that.

The kissing helped too, of course. Because she’d kissed him after she changed, and before she pulled him down onto the air mattress, and she’s kissing him now, her fingernails dragging along the texture of his t-shirt and causing gooseflesh to rise all up and down his arms. He presses closer, his leg climbing to a place where Darcy gasps and starts to arch a little, and if she replies to his _thigh_ that way, imagine if he—

A noise pulls him directly out of the moment, distracting him from all the “if” scenarios in the world. Actually, not _a_ noise. Four noises. Four loud, staccato, confident noises, and all of them at his front door.

“Please tell me I am hallucinating the knocking,” he groans, his lips two inches from Darcy’s gorgeous, swollen mouth and desperate to return. But of course, as soon as he asks, he hears it again. 

Darcy whimpers as though she’s in pain. “Do people not know what day it is?” she demands. When she flops her head back against the pillow, her curls spill all over the place like they belong to some recently-defiled virgin. Not for the first time, Wade wishes he’d picked a different, less sexy analogy. “Because I’m pretty sure the official subtitle is ‘get laid day.’ People should appreciate.”

“You’d be surprised how bad people are with calendars,” Wade comments, but then the knocking’s back with renewed fervor. “Hang on!” he shouts, and half-crawls, half-rolls out from under the canopy of blankets so he can wander back to the door. He steps over Darcy’s shoes to get there, plus his own work bag and an inexplicable pair of socks, and—

“Wade Wilson?” asks the huge edible arrangement on the other side of the door. When Wade stares at it for a second too long, a human head pops up from around its back side, therefore proving that a giant vase of fruit, cookies, and chocolates on sticks did not in fact gain sentience and start talking to him. He’s vaguely aware of a scrambling noise behind him, too, but the delivery guy’s the one holding his attention. Mostly because he looks super pissed off to be working on “get laid day,” and also because he’s holding an enormous assortment of food-bearing sticks.

A lot of the cookies are heart-shaped, by the way.

In case you cared.

“ _Are_ you Wade Wilson?” the delivery guy demands impatiently. “Because I’ve got this thing for a Wade, with instructions that it either goes to the Wade or goes back to sender, and—”

“Yeah, no, sorry, I’m Wade,” Wade answers stupidly, and the delivery guy heaves such a long, hard sigh that the cellophane around the arrangement crackles. He shoves the vase forward like he can’t bear to hold it for another second. 

Luckily, Darcy is suddenly there, her too-big pajama pants riding down to show a tantalizing strip of lacy panties and her hair all tangled and messy from quality making out. Wade tries to call _thank you_ after the guy, but finds out that his voice is all strangled and rough; not that it matters, because Darcy’s tearing into the cellophane like a mad woman and already gunning for the strawberries. Poor seedy red bastards never stood a chance.

“Okay, listen, I don’t know who this ‘En’ guy is, but I like him,” she declares once Wade’s closed and locked the door. The vase is resting on one of her fabulous hips while her other hand gestures with a half-naked fruit-skewer and a square of cardstock. “I mean, any friend who buys us fruit and cookies is forever okay in my book.”

“En?” Wade repeats. 

Darcy nods, pausing in her efforts to drag another strawberry off her skewer to hand Wade the slip of paper. “I tell Clint that we’re going out tonight, he reminds me to use protection. Which, by the way, was disturbing, given that it ended him talking about ‘replenishing the workplace stash.’ I mean, for one, are they not to the point where—”

She keeps talking. Wade knows she keeps talking, knows it with a certainty he usually reserves for his own heartbeat and the backs of his own hands, but he reads the stupid delivery card instead of really _listening_. One time becomes four, becomes _ten_ , and when they wander back to the blanket fort armed with the newly-arrived snacks and a couple sodas out of the fridge, it’s still clutched in Wade’s hand.

Hours later, after Darcy’s nodded off in the middle of _The Dark Knight_ with her head propped against Wade’s shoulder, Wade glances over at the half-crumpled note on the entertainment system. In the shadows from the Christmas lights and the movie, it reminds him of the outside of a geode, craggy and unremarkable.

People, he thinks, are a little like geodes, too.

He digs through the blankets and pillows until he finds his phone and, almost unthinkingly, opens up a new message.

 **Me:** _thx_

He tries to drop his phone back into the mess after he thumbs the send button, to enjoy the film and the almost-familiar warmth of Darcy cuddled up against his side, but he can’t. No, instead he turns his phone over and over in his hand, spinning and flipping it with idle, restless fingers. The screen dims eventually, then darkens, but he never again considers letting go.

Especially since, a few minutes later, a reply buzzes through.

 **Nathan ________ Summers:** _You’re welcome. Happy Valentine’s Day, Wade._

 _happy v-day, nate_ , Wade texts back, and he wakes up hours later to find the Blu-Ray player displaying the welcome screen and his phone still heavy in his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The posting schedule through the end of this story can be found [here.](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/60135489346/the-newest-mpu-posting-schedule-is-upon-us-as-you)
> 
> The other members of the Learned Hand Jobs are:
> 
> [Kitty Pryde (Shadowcat)](http://marvel.wikia.com/Katherine_Pryde_\(Earth-616\))   
>  [Piotr Rasputin (Colossus)](http://marvel.wikia.com/Piotr_Rasputin_\(Earth-616\))   
>  [Sam Wilson (Falcon)](http://marvel.wikia.com/Samuel_Wilson_\(Earth-616\))
> 
> Two of them appeared in Permanency--if you paid attention, of course.


	10. Happiness and Other Unnamable Emotions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, everything's coming up Wilson! Well. When Wade says that, what he really means is that there are no unprecedentedly epic disasters in this chapter. Soul-searching? A little. Awkward silences? Maybe a few. The cold hand of reality sending shivers down his spine? Yeah, because reality's a freaking jerk like that. But otherwise, seriously, everything's fine. Really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continued and unending thanks to Jen and saranoh, who waited for a very long time for me to finish this chapter, and who now are being inundated with words.

“Are you seriously humming?” Allan demands, and Wade buttons his lips.

Monday, as far as Wade is concerned, is the most glorious day of the week, full of light, laughter, and, yes, men who molest goats. And really, even the last part hardly bugs him today, Dothraki-style dreadlock bells included, because— Well, why? Why, on this unseasonably warm, beautiful February day, should he allow Allan Crane to rain on his parade? Radiant joy exists in the world, people. Beautiful, radiant, unprecedented _joy_.

Allan rubs a hand over his face right then, though, and Wade remembers why Allan Crane should be allowed to rain on his parade: he looks like hell warmed over and lightly toasted.

Wade shakes the joyous cobwebs out of the back of his head and leans forward until he’s resting his arms on his desk. “Sorry,” he says, and he’s surprised how much he means it. “I zoned out for a second. Case of the Mondays, and all that. You were saying?”

Allan snorts. “Yeah, for whatever good it’ll do,” he mutters, and drops his hands into his lap before starting the story all over again.

In Wade’s defense—and wow, it’s kind of worrying how often he’s forced to start a sentence like that—it’s not Allan’s fault that he’s sort of scattered and stupid this Monday morning. Already, he’s sent out three incomplete e-mails, left his coffee in the men’s room, discovered that his socks don’t match, and tripped over the stupid warped rug in the lobby. He’s not operating at full capacity—according to the nasty look from Emma this morning, he’s hardly operating at quarter capacity—but that’s not on Allan.

No, that’s on Darcy. Darcy, who left his side for the second time all weekend that very morning, wearing the quality Target-brand slacks and shirt she’d ran out and bought Saturday morning, and smelling mostly of Old Spice and Pert Plus. Which, by the way, she’d complained about. Like Wade really had time to use a separate shampoo and conditioner. Please.

“Wade?” Allan asks, and Wade nearly jerks out of his chair as he’s tugged back into the conversation.

“Yeah, sorry, just making sure my notes are right,” he says, and glances down at his notepad. He’s literally written five words: nut, red cup, cake, bros. He frowns at his own chicken scratch for a second. “So, you were at a frat party for— Whose birthday?”

Allan sighs. “Kevin Almond.”

“Right, okay. Keep going.”

For a second or two, Allan stares across the desk at him. Wade feels like he’s being slowly peeled apart, banana-style—like Allan’s stripping away the thick outer protection and finding the soft white flesh inside or, you know, whatever—but then, the guy heaves another long, heavy sigh. He’s obviously exhausted down to the bones of him, dark circles hanging under his eyes and his clothes all disheveled, and Wade wonders for the first time what kind of toll this whole alleged crime spree’s taken on his future as a hackey-sack champion and professional interpretive dancer. 

Either way, Allan picks up where he left off, and Wade tries to track the meandering story to its damn point. Two-thirds of his job involves finding the glimmers of truth in ridiculous, unbelievable, overblown stories, and Wade wants to follow this one. He wants to do an okay job for Allan, because he’s not a criminal mastermind, just a snotty little hipster shit.

But his mind keeps wandering back to the weekend: eating pizza in the blanket fort, dodging preteens at the laser tag place (and destroying a team that included Stark-and-Banner’s kid, his chubby best friend, and a bunch of shrieking sixth grade girls in really tight jeggings), eating dinner out, and, uhm—

Wade will refrain from the very filthy R-rated joke he just thought of, but needless to say, some memories of the weekend are more distracting than others.

He keeps scribbling down notes, though, painting a half-accurate picture of a probably inaccurate tale: Allan and his friends at a frat party somebody threw not on campus but out of town at their uncle’s farm, a lot of weed and a lot of booze, a near-miss fist-fight over a girl named Harmony, and then, nothing.

“Nothing?” Wade echoes, glancing up from his legal pad.

“Nothing.” Allan rubs his eyes. He looks strange with three days of stubble, less purposely-unwashed and more actually-unwashed, and for the first time, a rubber band of concern snaps in the depths of Wade’s gut. “I think I blacked out, because after the whole thing over Mony—”

“She actually lets you call her ‘Mony?’ Somebody should probably tell her how that sounds, because I think I own videos headlined by girls named Mony.”

“—it’s a weird blur.” Allan drops his hands into his lap and shakes his head. Every breath he releases sounds resigned, a far cry from the snotty anti-government _the man is keeping me down_ asshole who waltzed into Wade’s office weeks ago. “I swear, until you told me I did something to that goat, I never knew. And then, Luke sent around those pictures, and I—”

“Wait, wait, no, no more words.” Wade’s pen scratches a long line across the middle of the legal pad. Not on purpose, but because Wade’s trying to both scribble down a new set of notes while waving at Allan to shut his damn mouth and, hey, accidents happen. He adds _goat pictures Luke_ to the collection of chicken-scratch and then focuses back across his desk. “There are pictures?”

Allan pales. “I guess? They’re shitty cell phone pictures, you can’t really see anything. I—”

“Allan.” Wade tries to keep his voice very steady and calm, but he feels it catch just a tiny bit in the back of his throat. He swallows and tries again. “You blacked out, you have no knowledge of doing anything to the goat, and someone else—who you said doesn’t like you very much—suddenly had pictures of the whole event?” His leg starts bouncing, totally against his will. He tries to cross his other one over it, but all he really succeeds in doing is banging his knee on the underside of the desk. Not that it matters: Allan’s staring at him like he’s a crazy person.

Then again, he might actually look like one right now. Especially since he’s grinning like a lunatic, and everything.

“Why are you grinning like a lunatic?” Allan asks. His face ticks into a scowl, but not a deep one. It’s wading-pool shallow, and Wade thinks maybe—just _maybe_ —it’s attempting to plaster over a tiny glimmer of ill-advised hope. “Photos are evidence that I— _did_ something.”

“Or,” Wade corrects, pointing his pen across the desk, “they’re proof that you didn’t do anything and you’re friends with assholes.” He flips to a blank page on his notepad and pushes the whole thing over to Allan, pen included. “I need to know everything you know about Luke. Full first name, middle name, last name, aliases, date of birth, place of birth, date of death—”

“He’s not _dead_ ,” Allan breaks in. He’s clearly still skeptical. Please. As if Wade’s ever steered him wrong in the last, what, four weeks?

“Fine, then not his date of death. But every detail you know about him, I want written down on that piece of paper in the next—” Wade glances at the wall clock. “—five minutes. And when I’m back, you’re going to tell me every detail about your friends, and that girl you banged—”

“I never banged Harmony!” Allan squeaks, proof positive that he and Harmony banged in twenty-seven different ways.

“—and whatever else you can tell me about the party. I’ll even listen in actual detail this time.”

He’s halfway out of his chair and reaching for his cell phone—oh, like you’ve never played Candy Crush Saga in the bathroom—when he catches on that Allan’s still staring up at him. It’s not skeptical and cynical anymore, really; instead, it’s hopeful, and that’s a new look on this particular client.

All at once, Wade realizes how young the guy is. Sure, he’s a pot-smoking, heavy-drinking, college-aged idiot, but he’s not exactly the first person on the planet to make stupid choices because of peer pressure or pretty girls. If anything, it only better-qualifies him to become vice president of Wade’s very own _I Want to See Her Naked So I Turned into an Asshole_ club.

“Do you actually think we can find some way to get me out of this?” Allan finally asks after several more seconds of them silently staring one another down.

Wade wets his lips, then presses them together. He can feel the cut from when he ran into a doorframe at the laser tag place while protecting Darcy’s back from a gaggle of ten-year-olds. “I don’t know,” he admits once he’s done playing his tongue over the tiny scab, “but since I’m pretty okay at what I do, I’m going to try.”

 

==

 

“Hey, look, you weren’t murdered,” Carol says at lunch. 

Wade, maturely, allows her the opportunity to examine the full glory of his middle finger. She replies in kind, requiring that he set down his soda and involve his other hand, and that’s how Bobby and Nate find them when they wander into the conference room three minutes later: two attorneys, middle fingers on proud display, glaring at one another.

“The world is as it should be,” Nate comments, and slides the Wendy’s bag over in Wade’s direction.

“I’m not sure that’s how I’d describe it,” Bobby returns, and just for that, Wade steals one of his chicken nuggets before passing the bag along.

The sweet, succulent glory of deep-fried fast-food chicken plays across his tongue as he sinks into the nearest conference room chair and lets Carol find their soap opera on the flat-screen. Bobby smacks him upside the head for his treachery—like anyone really needs _twenty_ chicken nuggets, Bobby; somebody should tell your husband about your horrendous eating habits—and Nate stops fastidiously unwrapping his burger to chuckle at them. Wade retaliates by leaning across Nate and snatching two of his French fries, and then, just to be a shit, steals the pickles Nate’s peeled off his burger.

Carol rolls her eyes. “You are so weird.”

“Weird like a wildebeest,” Wade returns, mouth full of delicious, mustardy pickle.

“Still not a thing,” Bobby intones, and out of the corner of his eye, Wade catches Nate smiling. 

It’s the sort of rare, nearly-warm smile that wraps fingers around Wade’s heart and squeezes, and he directs his own idiot grin down at his baconator with extra cheese and extra bacon—they’ll do that, you know, if you ask really nicely and pay the extra couple bucks. Back in his office, the legal pad he’d pulled out fresh for his meeting with Allan is almost bursting in information, pages covered in his scribbled, indecipherable version of the frat party at the goat farm, threads of information connected with lines, arrows, and post-it notes. A buddy at the police department—well, okay, not _buddy_ , really, but Howlett hasn’t threatened him with physical violence for six months now, that’s bound to count for something—is running criminal history reports on all of Allan’s little shit friends (plus, you know, Harmony), Wade’s drafted a half-dozen discovery requests to drop in Maria Hill’s mailbox the next time he’s up at the judicial complex, and everything feels very _possible_.

He’s not sure the last time he felt like this, exactly. The world’s loomed large and terrifying in front of him for so long (even since before the cancer, really) that positivity’s always felt like a four-leaf clover: rare, elusive, and not really worth the trouble. Now—

Carol glances away from the political speech that’s apparently preempted their stories to squint at Wade. He squints back, and almost knocks Nate’s drink over while he reaches for a ketchup packet. “Wilson,” she says.

“Danvers.”

“You’re—perky.” And really, he wants to accept it for the compliment it is, but the squinting only darkens. “And not normal-perky. Suspicious-perky.”

“That’s a thing, now?” he asks. He squirts ketchup all over his fries, and also on the table some, too; Nate hands over a napkin literally two seconds after Wade’s wiped up the mess with his thumb and started sucking it off. 

“That’s actually always a thing, when you’re involved,” Nate promises. At least, it sounds like a promise.

At the end of the table, Bobby grins around one of his nineteen unnecessary chicken nuggets. “He’s getting the goat-fucker off,” he volunteers.

It’s really better for everyone involved that Wade’s holding a French fry in one hand and his burger in the other, because Bobby’s _not_ spent quality time with his middle fingers lately and, well, maybe it’s time that changed. “I’m not getting anybody off,” Wade corrects, and ignores Bobby’s snarky little smirk. “I am diligently and competently representing my client in his criminal defense. That’s a thing, by the way. Rules of professional responsibility, or whatever. Pull ‘em up on your iPhone.”

“I’m fairly sure Bobby’s read them,” Nate notes.

“I’m pretty sure he’s got them tattooed on his _thighs_ ,” Carol adds. Bobby, for his part, almost shoots Dr. Pepper out of his nose. Wade suddenly wonders what’s actually tattooed on his thighs. Hank’s handprints, maybe? “But that’s not what I’m talking about, because I don’t think that’s what’s making Wilson so _bouncy_.”

“You actually want to know what makes me bouncy?” Wade asks. He gestures a little with a half-floppy fry. “Because, I mean, I can tell you what makes me bouncy. Where do you want to start? The new Blueberry Redbull? Twizzlers by the pound? There’s those candies that pop when you put them on your tongue, those do it for me, never mind an afternoon of really hard—”

“Please don’t,” Bobby interrupts, putting up his hands.

“—Dance Dance Revolution,” Wade finishes with a flourish. He tosses the fry into his mouth and leans back in his chair. All the way back, far enough that one more shove might send him ass-over-teakettle onto the floor, not that he really cares. Wouldn’t be the first time, honestly. “I had a good client meeting, I had a better weekend. End of story.”

Carol’s eyes narrow one degree further, drawing into the tightest little slits that Wade’s ever seen on a human face, but it’s Nate, next to him, who sighs. A quick sideways glance reveals that his tiny smile’s smaller now, shriveled like a flower left out in the sun. Wade’s not a fan of the shriveling, if he’s honest. 

“And,” Nate adds, his tone almost painfully matter-of-fact, “he was not murdered.”

“You were going to get murdered?” Bobby asks. There’s actual concern on his face, like maybe he believes Wade spent his weekend ensconced in the seedy underbelly of the Suffolk County Methodist Mob and narrowly avoided a thorough shanking.

Which is why he answers, “No.”

Problem is, his answer pops out just as Carol explains, “Yeah, by his girlfriend.”

“Girl-space-friend,” Wade repeats for the hundredth time.

Bobby ignores him. “For what?”

So, incidentally, does Carol. “For missing Valentine’s Day.”

“But I _fixed_ it,” Wade stresses, because the raw emotional power of Carol’s self-satisfied smile is completely eclipsed by Bobby’s absolutely disbelieving stare. Seriously, Wade expects his eyes to pop out of his head and roll around on the table like something out of a crappy 1980s cartoon. “Really, it’s fine,” Wade defends. He even holds up his hands like little white flags of crappy significant other surrender. “I slightly forgot that there are certain Hallmark holidays in the month of February and almost glossed completely over it.”

“And almost died for it,” Carol chimes in helpfully. Bobby nods solemnly. Clearly, he believes the whole _death by the hands of Darcy_ line of the narrative. Which, actually, given that he’s already met Darcy, makes a lot of sense.

“Yeah, but I _didn’t_ ,” Wade reminds her. “Because after you cackled and, like, planned to make delicious s’mores over my smoldering corpse, Nate helped me get my head on straight and we put together the best Valentine’s Day surprise pretty much ever.” He nudges Nate in the arm, almost completely without thinking. “If the whole ‘lawyer to the troubled masses’ thing fails, you can always go into party planning, because—”

And that’s precisely the exact moment when Wade realizes that the _almost_ without thinking arm nudge actually happened _entirely_ without thinking, and that the whole room is very, very, _very_ quiet.

Bobby and Carol are both staring at him. Even without really looking at them, he feels the heat from their eyes. Their gazes crawl all over his skin, invisible bugs that he can’t brush off or slap into submission, and the longer they linger, the more he wants to slip under the table, crawl out the door, and disappear. Even the random senator—representative? Governor? Like he votes in state and local elections, really—on the TV judges him silently, his hand smacking the podium while his head of floppy white hair occasionally bumps into the big red _MUTE_ in the top corner of the screen.

But then, there’s Nate.

Nate, who chews with a sort of eerie, never-before-accomplished silence, whose eyes remain steadfastly on the middle of the table, and whose face never so much twitches into a smile or a frown at Wade’s whole party-planning ramble. Nate, who swallows and then reaches for his drink, who moves as though he’s chiseled from stone, and who sips through his straw without breathing. Carol and Bobby might be staring at Wade and his big, stupid, uncontrollable mouth, but Wade stares at Nate and his frustrating, impossible impassivity.

People, he thinks for the thousandth time in the last however-many months, don’t behave like Nate Summers.

And they definitely don’t break thirty-plus seconds of really _intense_ silence by glancing at the television and saying, “I think our program’s back on.”

The six words feel like a half-dozen sharp slaps to the face, and when Wade jerks his head away from the man beside him, Carlotta flicks off her sunglasses and sneers, showing perfect white teeth. The poolside scenes are always the most dramatic, filled with tanned bodies and over-the-top cabana boys (always, _always_ of the gay variety), but Wade can’t even begin to crack a smile. Instead, Carol mutters through some insipid line about a missing mojito, Bobby picks up the thread as Cabana Boy Number Three, and slowly, lunch returns to some semblance of normal. Not _true_ normal, of course, but normal enough, the kind where Wade even catches himself chuckling a couple times near the end.

But he never finishes his burger, and he lets his soggy fries turn cold and extra ketchupy.

And by the time he thinks of what else he can say about Valentine’s Day, edible arrangements, and party-planning, Nate’s already balled up his burger wrapper and walked out the door without a single, solitary word.

 

==

 

“Am I your personal Doctor Phil?” Clint demands as he tosses his empty bottle of water in the trash.

“Depends on whether you’re kind of an ableist asshole,” Wade retorts, and he finds out that Clint held onto the cap to the bottle when the guy pings it at his head.

As an abstract concept, friendship is actually sort of weird. Think about it for a second: the world’s filled with, like, millions upon billions of people, all of them totally different and unique—you know, special snowflakes, but not said in a snotty, sarcastic way. Becoming friends with somebody is like rooting through the giant dumpster of human beings called “the planet,” finding a person who’s kind of okay, and declaring, “Yeah, great, you’re mine, now.” And once that’s happened, you basically cling to that person like a second skin, eating meals with them, helping them move, and occasionally being pinged in the face by water bottle caps.

Wade’s not sure who came up with the whole friendship thing, but he likes it a lot. At least, he likes it tonight. Check back with him in the morning.

Because tonight, he’s sitting cross-legged on the countertop directly next to Phil Coulson’s stove, his head lulled back against the upper cabinets and a half-finished water bottle in his grip. The unseasonably warm February Monday continued through Tuesday and then Wednesday, leading to a long series of text messages from Clint about running after work. Apparently, Coulson’s prepping a trial and can’t participate in his and Clint’s weird athletically-based foreplay, and that turns Clint into a farm dog who’s desperate to be run through the fields. Not that Wade minds, exactly. No, Wade’s legs feel pleasantly tingly after five miles, like he’s done the internet’s favorite “sugar and olive oil” rub on them again, and he likes the lingering burn in his lungs.

Yeah, okay, maybe he’s a little weird.

He’s also watching as Clint bends over for another one of the water bottles out of Coulson’s zombie apocalypse cabinet. Other items squirreled in there include a Costco pack of paper towels, ten cans of baked beans, and—

“Why does your boyfriend have an extra blender?” Wade asks.

Clint shrugs as he breaks the seal on the second bottle. “Give your relationship with Darcy another six months, and you’ll learn that asking about the weird shit only makes it seem weird _er_.”

“That is literally the worst pep talk in the world, you know that? ‘Relationships only get weirder, so pretend you didn’t see anything and then drink to forget.’”

Across the kitchen, his buddy sighs and rests his hip against the countertop. “I thought I was playing Doctor Phil tonight, not— Uhm— That other guy.”

Wade rolls his eyes. “You can stop acting like you recognized that pop culture reference. I’ve already judged you accordingly and subtracted the requisite friendship points.”

“Thank god,” Clint retorts, and swigs his water while Wade laughs. 

Aside from their unseasonable warmth, allowing for lots of melted-snow puddles to splash through and a friendly run with Clint the part-time border collie, the last couple days of Wade’s life have felt, well, weird. Disjointed, almost, like the Wade who spent all weekend lounging around with Darcy, hitting regular triples and creaming children at laser tag suddenly shriveled up and disappeared. This new Wade, the one born Monday afternoon and who sits on the counter right now, he’s all uncertain and messed up in the head, plagued by silence and long looks. Because that’s all work’s been, really, since the incident at lunch: stretches of pin-drop quiet, last-second glances, and Bobby Drake shaking his stupid head from across the hall.

Sorry that not everybody marries their high school sweetheart, Bobby Drake. Some people never even _got_ high school sweethearts, thanks to their stupid gangly limbs, their stupid unstoppable mouth, and the stigma attached with missing a month of junior year just because—

“So, let me get this straight,” Clint says. He’s speaking slowly, which is kind of nice because it lets Wade’s inner monologue taper off naturally instead of being sawed off like a limb infected by super fast-moving snake venom. “You have a friend—”

Wade nods hard enough that his teeth crack against one another in his mouth. “ _Definitely_ a friend,” he promises, just like he promised back during their jog around the lake, and through Coulson’s neighborhood, and past the Dairy Queen that stays closed until mid-March because it’s not yet figured out that people still eat ice cream in the winter.

Clint nods, his fingers flexing around his water bottle. “And your friend’s friend is attracted to him. But he—the friend—has a boyfriend—”

“Or girlfriend.”

“—and is therefore unavailable. But he’s not told the guy who’s attracted to him to go to hell and leave him alone, either.” There is something incredibly suspicious and also just a _little_ accusatory in the way Clint glances across the kitchen, right then. Wade decides right away that he’s not a fan. “Which is, by the way, what he should do, unless you’ve conveniently left out part of the story.”

Suddenly, Wade understands the suspicious accusation. He doesn’t _like_ it, mind you, but at least he understands why it’s reared its ugly head or whatever. He drags fingers through his still sweat-damp hair and sighs. “It’s kind of complicated,” he offers, as though it’s not the most half-hearted, limp-wristed thing he’s said all night.

“No shit,” Clint mutters, and swigs his water again.

Wade watches him chug from the bottle, studying the bob of his Adam’s apple and whatever other poetic narration you’d like to accompany his crisis of confusion, and the longer he watches, the more he wants to explain literally everything. The words lap at the back of his throat like a violent ocean tide or bile (hey, the two things are kind of similar, okay?), and he swallows around them as he tries to place them in precise, military order. Because that’s what this whole conversation requires, okay? It requires lining up the sequence of events—the year and a half working with Nate, the decision to ask Darcy out, Nate’s behavior _since_ Darcy, the critical levels of fear and dread and hope and _want_ that now reside permanently in Wade’s guts—and then, well, sharing them with the class.

But then, all of a sudden, Clint stops drinking and tips his head to one side like the border collie Wade keeps comparing him to.

And then, also all of a sudden, the front door opens.

Clint immediately grins like a card-carrying maniac, all teeth and crinkled laugh-lines, not that he realizes it. No, Clint never realizes how genuinely warm and fuzzy he turns when Coulson’s suddenly slotted into the picture. Not that Wade’s in a hurry to tell him, or anything. Instead, he listens to the hollow thumps of Phil kicking off his shoes in the front hall, the jingle of his keys, and the inevitable sigh when he realizes that the battered Geo Metro parked on the street plus the almost-destroyed Nike running shoes means—

“I’m starting to think we should just buy Wilson a doggie bed and let him sleep in the living room,” Coulson greets as he walks through the kitchen door, and Wade responds with a completely adult huff and eye-roll. The guy’s still dressed in the full Chief Assistant District Attorney monkey suit, tie and all, but he looks tired as hell. Wade’s suddenly very glad he never applied for a position at that incestuous circle of hell his friends (and Darcy) call a workplace. 

“He followed me home,” Clint says. He keeps holding onto the water bottle, but his whole body language radiates with his need to touch his less-interesting half. 

Coulson slings his bag onto a kitchen chair. “This wouldn’t happen if you’d stop feeding him.”

“You know, if I had just a little bit more self-esteem and a little less self-preservation, I’d tell you that comparing me to a stray dog is actually kind of offensive,” Wade informs them both. “Plus, I haven’t had fleas since Boy Scout camp.” Both men twist to stare at him. What? Like you’ve never spent three weeks sleeping on an old mattress on the porch of a cabin after the other boys kicked you out of your bunk for both your flatulence and your inability to trek through the woods like some sort of weird organic Power Ranger.

The prolonged eye contact drags out like the stupid _when you turn off your cell phone, does it dream?_ commercial at the movie theater before Coulson, predictably, shakes his head. Not in a derisive way, either, but just like he’s clearing cobwebs. Clint’s grin softens into a smile, and he ditches the water bottle to come over, crowd into his boyfriend’s bubble of personal space, and mumble something before they kiss.

The kissing’s simultaneously cute and really disgusting. Like, teeth-rottingly, brain-meltingly, sticky-sweet _gross_ , but in that way where you’re not willing to drop your eyes and stare at the floor, either. When they pull away, they’re not exactly gasping for breath or anything, but they’re still tangled up like two peas in a really mismatched pod.

“Do I want to know, this time?” Coulson asks after a couple seconds of space-sharing and near-nuzzling.

Clint sort of rolls his eyes. It’s a fond gesture, but _just_ barely. Really, Wade’d mistake it for exasperation or worse if he didn’t know the guy so damn well. “Wade’s friend wants to grope him despite his relationship with Darcy.”

“Not _me_ ,” Wade insists, holding up his hands. Because clearly, raising his palms in defense is a sure sign that he’s innocent of all possible grope scenarios. “My friend. My friend, and his friend, and the girlfriend. You know, like in the Bible, where the friend of your enemy is your enemy. Wait.” He frowns at himself, and runs the line back over in his head because it sounds wrong.

Coulson sighs. ”It’s an Arabic proverb, and it’s ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’” He glances at Clint for about three beats too long. “I’m having a beer,” he decides.

“I think we all need beer,” Clint returns, and at least Coulson’s sensible enough to nod in agreement.

The conversation mostly devolves from there, so Wade—helpful uninvited water-and-beer guest that he is—tucks his legs up tighter on the counter and lets two of the most disgustingly happy people he knows maneuver around Coulson’s little kitchen. It’s used but not lived-in, no homey accents or personalized touches to really declare it _Phil’s_ , and Wade’s struck by exactly how much the suit-wearing, defendant-scaring, badass attorney really needs his boyfriend around. The house needs Clint’s t-shirts on the floor in the bathroom, Clint’s sneakers abandoned by the door, and Clint’s laughter when he wears Coulson down with a bicker-fight about ordering pizza for dinner.

He must realize it, though. Because by the time Clint’s dragged out a laptop and started surfing around for pizza deals, Coulson’s stripped off the jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves, and handed out the beers. Three beers, one for each of them, as though Wade sitting on the counter isn’t actually a big deal at all.

“So,” Coulson says after a greedy swallow of his moderately-expensive, slightly-hoppy beer in its nice brown bottle (frat-boy style cans need not apply), “you’re having more trouble with your relationship?”

At the kitchen table, Clint groans. “You get him started, he’s going to tell you a convoluted and indecipherable version of the truth,” he warns. He never looks up from where he’s picking out toppings for what appears to be an extra-large thin-crust. Solid choice. “It’s going to be about friends who like friends and girlfriends-or-boyfriends, nothing that makes sense, and you’ll wish you’d just stayed in trial prep.”

“It’d take a lot more than a convoluted story to make me wish that,” Coulson returns.

But his timing’s pretty shitty, because Wade accidentally runs right over his comment by saying, “I think there’s a— _something_ growing between me and my friend Nate.”

Both of the men, one his friend and one his friend’s creepily competent boyfriend, stop what they’re doing to stare at him. For Clint, that means his hands drop away from the computer track-pad and keyboard, leaving him with this wide-eyed fish expression. For Coulson, it means swallowing a mouthful of beer and lowering his bottle very, very slowly.

And then, there’s Wade, sitting there like he’s the fish (with the fishbowl all around them; the world’s an aquarium and he’s the object of everyone’s distraction, a pretty fishy swimming around for their amusement). He drags his fingers through his hair, then starts picking at the label on the beer bottle. “We— When I started at the office, we could barely stand each other,” he explains, his voice sounding distant and unfamiliar, like hearing yourself in a recording, “but after the last year and a half, we started to find this balance, I guess. And then, I don’t know, I started going out with Darcy and our balance turned into a teeter-totter, tipping up and down and refusing to level out.” He demonstrates with one of his hands, but Coulson and Clint just keep watching him. 

He realizes, very suddenly, how little about his personal life he actually shares. With strangers, with friends, with people like Clint who he absolutely trusts but is still sometimes a little afraid is trolling him.

He drops his hand back into his lap. “I think something’s happening, and it’s just— We’re finally friends. Not good friends, not me-and-Clint friends—”

“I’m starting to think you don’t have a ton of those,” Clint murmurs. He actually sounds, you know, nice about it. Decent, like he understands that particular feeling and wants to share it.

Wade swallows. “We’re friends,” he repeats, “but we’re not always great at acting like friends, and I don’t know how to deal with the fact that it seems like he now wants to be more-than-friends when I already have a more-than-friend friend.”

“And suddenly, the whole ‘age of the spaz’ thing makes sense,” Clint says. Wade tries a casual bob of his head, like being called out on one of his billion human failings is really no big deal, but he’s never been good at faking important things.

And then, Coulson asks, “Are you attracted to this friend?”

His voice stays all impassive and calm, like the question’s totally fair, but— Well, actually, the question _is_ totally fair. Wade knows it’s fair, reasonable, and balanced—like cable news always claims to be—but just because he knows about the fairness doesn’t mean he embraces the fairness. If anything, the fairness makes it harder to breathe, harder to think, and harder to swallow down the three gulps of beer he requires for liquid courage. 

Coulson’s still waiting when he sets the bottle back down, so he says, “It doesn’t really matter if I am or not, since I have a girl-space-friend who I’m with, and everything.”

“That wasn’t the question,” Coulson responds blandly.

“No, but it’s the answer.” The other guy quirks an eyebrow. “I mean, I know it’s not a good answer, I know it’s maybe not the _right_ answer, but it’s the answer that I’ve got. Okay? It’s the only one I have, so it’s the one you’re stuck with, and that’s sort of all there is to it.”

There’s no reply, just catastrophic and impossible silence, so Wade gulps down a few more mouthfuls of too-strong beer. He decides somewhere between peeling off a fresh strip of label and belching that he’s okay with catastrophic silence. Sure, maybe it marks the coming apocalypse, but it’s also quiet. Free of fair questions and their corresponding-but-shitty answers.

Coulson leans back against the counter as the quiet drags on, watching Wade steadily—but then, everything about Coulson is steady. The man’s a fixed point in time, absolutely and perfectly unwavering. No wonder Clint loves him so much; in sonnet language, Coulson’s the navigating star and Clint’s the stupid wandering ship that needs shelter from the storm. 

He might be mixing his sonnets with Bob Dylan, a little.

“If you’re happy with Darcy,” Coulson comments, like he’s totally unaware of the enormous compliment Wade’s just paid him (in his head, of course), “you should sit your friend down and have a serious discussion about it. Tell him you’re in a relationship and that you don’t plan on changing that.”

Wade drops his eyes to his beer bottle. There’s a thin strip of label hanging by a thread, so he pulls it off. “Yeah.”

“Unless, of course, you’re not happy.” And as much as every muscle in Wade’s body jumps at that one line—his heart, his shoulders, his jaw, the ones that produce the sharp and not entirely welcome stinging feeling that always accompanies strong emotions—he still can’t lift his head. “And if that’s the case, that’s not something talking to your friend can fix.”

Wade nods, limply, but he keeps his mouth shut. Well, as shut as you can when you’re worrying your lips and glaring at the condensation-damp beer bottle in your grip, or when your stomach and head both hurt from thinking so hard. He scrapes his teeth along his lower lip until he’s stripped off a layer of skin and knows that the sharp tang of blood isn’t far off, and listens to the little noises around him: Clint typing something on the computer, Coulson’s fingers drumming against his own beer bottle, a car rolling by.

Finally, Clint comments, “I gave him the same basic advice, you know.”

Wade rolls his eyes. “And for that, you’re a match made in freaking heaven,” he mutters.

But when he glances up—just with his eyes, in case the situation still sucks and he’s required to stare at his hands for a bit longer—Clint’s grinning and even Coulson’s face looks just a little bit lighter than usual. 

He sticks around after that, eating pizza in the impersonal kitchen and watching an American soccer game with Clint on Coulson’s _Better Homes and Gardens_ couch before he finally heads home. It’s chilly and dark outside, back to February’s cold winds and cloudy skies, and Wade realizes too late that he only wore his t-shirt and long-sleeved Under Armor running and skipped out on a coat. His Metro’s heater blows lukewarm, dusty air the whole way home. 

He stands under a hot shower for a long time, then crawls into bed.

And while he absolutely and stalwartly does not sleep, he never feels awake, either.

 

==

 

“Nadine, for the _last_ time,” Nate growls, and then disappears down the hallway. Again. For the sixth or seventh time in the last hour. 

It’s Friday night, and just like on every Friday night except the last one (thanks, commercialized love-based holidays, for cutting into Wade’s schedule!), Wade’s sprawled out in one of the chairs across from Nate’s desk, picking through the stupid online forms that Nate’s coded and re-coded. But instead of the usual light-hearted banter and law- and food-based humor, he finds himself staring at the backs of two monitors with no silver-haired head behind them, an empty chair with no muscular man mountain _in_ it, and an office that is otherwise devoid of whatever species Nate counts as.

Other than the snippets of conversation carrying in from the hallway, he’s totally on his own, left to his own extremely bored devices.

Worse, he misses Nate.

He sort of hates himself for that.

After his Wednesday night non-sleep and a heavily-caffeinated Thursday, he’d expected the palpable tension between him and Nate to leech into their usual Friday night routine, but Nate’d surprised him by showing up with a smile and a huge party pack of grocery store sushi. Of _course_ Nate’d surprised him, because Wade’s pretty sure that’s the other guy’s modus operandi at this point, his grand scheme for whatever plot he’s slowly unleashing on the world: act broody and mysterious one minute, smile disarmingly the next, and watch as all the pages slowly shake out of Wade’s binding and leave him an empty husk of a man.

Or maybe, he’d thought, just _maybe_ , he’d read the whole Nate situation entirely wrong. Because, laughing over shrimp tempura rolls and fighting over the last strip of ginger, it’d seemed totally possible that Wade’d misunderstood everything about Nathan Sherlock Summers (again, not his middle name), and that their friendship actually worked. So possible, in fact, that Wade’d built a whole new universe in his own head before they ran out of wasabi, one where heavy silences and days of tension only happened because of a bug in Nate’s own robotic programming, and where nothing ever went wrong.

If he noticed the way pauses between them dragged out too long, he never piped up about it.

If he caught the few times Nate started to say something, stopped, and changed the subject, well, he kept his stupid mouth shut.

And then, Nate’s phone’d started ringing in his desk drawer, and everything changed.

Wade throws himself back into the task at hand, entering fake data into a do-it-yourself will to make sure all the fields populate properly in the final product. Today’s future dead person is none other than their very own Emma Frost, who plans on leaving her jar of children’s freshly-fallen tears to Carol Danvers. He types Carol’s name into the next box with a flourish, hits publish—and then watches as his screen fills with what can only be described as “Satan’s chicken-scratch.”

Okay, really, it’s just a RTF file filled with a muddled collection of Wingdings and Dingbats characters, but “Satan’s chicken-scratch” sounds a lot cooler. Plus, Emma’s name is actually present _and_ in Times New Roman, so that sort of counts as progress. Right?

Maybe?

He closes out of Wordpad and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. He’s tried the will three separate times, the result’s _always_ the same, and he really needs Nate to reappear and work his sausage-fingered voodoo magic on the damn thing.

But of course, Nate’s still pacing down the hallway like an angry, caged animal, still—

“Has it occurred to you I might have plans this weekend?” Nate snaps, and Wade sits up so fast that he almost dumps his laptop onto the floor. When he twists around in his chair, he catches a half-second glimpse of Nate’s arm disappearing out of the doorway, but the man’s voice still carries. No, more than carries, it booms down the hallway, full and angry in a way Wade’s only ever witnessed once before. “No, you need to listen to me. We traded last weekend with three weekends from now, not— I have followed every aspect of the agreement, Nadine, and you cannot expect me to roll over and show my soft belly every damnable time you . . . ”

His voice trails off then, accompanied by heavy footfalls clomping down the stairs, and Wade presses his lips together. He’s not necessarily _straining_ to hear, exactly, but he’s maybe (definitely) allowing a tiny, insignificant, miniscule (but enormous) amount of hope to trickle into his brain and root there. Unlike Bobby, who wears his personal life on his sleeve, and Carol, who does the same with her lack of personal life, Nate’s a mystery. A card-carrying, fully-inducted member of the Mysterious League of Mysterious Men, and Wade—

He’s curious, okay?

More than that, he’s wondering what besides screwed up immigration cases can turn Nate totally livid in zero-point-two seconds.

He forces Nate’s sexy, gravelly angry-voice out of his brain and returns to Dropbox, scanning through all the waiting forms and finally picking out the super-broken child support worksheet from a couple weeks earlier. He starts filling in names and numbers, creating salaries and liabilities off the top of his head, but automatically; he’s fictionally divorced Jane and Thor and split up their four kids so many times at this point, it’s mostly muscle memory. But the whole time, he keeps straining to hear more of Nate’s voice rumbling down the hallway, or up the stairs, or _anywhere_.

When he shoves his laptop onto the corner of the desk, he almost knocks the tiny (unused) packets of soy sauce off. When he checks his own phone, he finds that the only waiting messages are an e-mail from an “adult entertainment” website and a silly trivia selfie that Darcy sent him two hours ago, right before he settled down to work with Nate.

He’d never replied to it, but now feels like the wrong time.

He shoves his phone in his back pocket and decides to visit the men’s room. The one downstairs, because that’s where they keep the nice paper towels and absolutely not because that’s where Nate wandered off to.

No, really.

Wade thinks while he walks, even though thinking is generally dangerous and almost never recommended. He means to focus on normal things, too—his weekend shopping list, his promise to help Darcy memorize her administrative law outline on Sunday, his upcoming muy thai belt test—but his mind wanders into darker, less-inviting corners. They’re corners infested with horrible, nagging thoughts, thoughts like Coulson’s fair question and about the first and only time he ever sat in on one of Nate’s immigration proceeding. These corners, they’re dangerous, but his mind bricks itself into each one like in that Edgar Allen Poe story.

At least in the story, everybody got drunk first.

Downstairs, he can hear Nate’s voice echoing in from the lobby, rumbling like distant but indecipherable thunder. He forces himself to ignore it as he ducks into the men’s room, locks the door, and flips on the light. The fluorescent bulb flickers before deciding that, sure, it’ll burn his retinas off with its unfeeling white glow, and Wade squints at it until the pain subsides. He “takes care of business,” so to speak, washes his hands, and then leans down and splashes cold water on his face. He assumes, stupidly, that the chill might help sort out all the shit rumbling through his brain, but instead he’s left trying to answer dozens of meaningless questions.

Like who he’s attracted to, and why.

Like whether he’s happy, and with whom.

Like what feelings lurk deep inside the shiny robotic chest-box Nate’s hiding under his skin-suit.

Like what feelings lurk deep inside Wade’s own ribcage.

The nice paper towels do nothing to quiet the whirring sound in the back of Wade’s brain. He switches off the light, allows himself a full thirty seconds of standing helplessly in the dark, and then steps back into the hallway.

The way their offices are arranged, what with the arbitrary walls built here-and-there to allow everyone to share nicely and the secure doors meant to prevent criminals from breaking in and stealing confidential client files, the hallway outside the bathroom branches out in three directions. The first leads down to Emma’s office and the ladies’ room that always ( _always_ ) smells like vanilla, the second heads straight up the stairs and back to work, and the third trails down past the conference room and out into the lobby. Wade ignores Emma’s office—mostly because he worries sometimes that she knows when he’s just _thought_ about touching her stuff, never mind when he’s actually done it—and stares up the steps for a long, long time. He needs to finish testing the child support form, to walk through the final edits on the divorce-without-children forms, and to reread the printable power of attorney documents to insure they’re totally typo-free. There’s a soda waiting for him up there, plus a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup he stole out of Carol’s not-so-secret stash. And, better still, he won’t be edging into Nate’s life that way, or trying to answer questions that he really, _really_ needs to leave alone.

But then, he remembers that the edible arrangement included chocolate-covered peanut butter cookies, and that, miraculously, the shrimp tempura rolls’d come without the nasty brown sauce the grocery store usually bathes them in.

Wade walks out into the lobby, instead.

The dim, yellowy light that filters in through the tall lobby windows reduces Nate to a broad-shouldered silhouette, his shadow stretching long across the floor. He holds his phone to his ear, nodding but unmoving; whether Wade actually witnesses him wetting his lips or imagines it, well, that’s anybody’s guess, really. When he releases a sigh, it echoes off glass and tile, reverberating until it’s a whisper instead of a gust.

“I can’t keep doing this,” he says quietly, and Wade freezes in place, his toes barely nudging the fancy geometric rug that decorates the middle of the floor. “I can’t rearrange my schedule every time you— No, Nadine. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to Hope, either.”

Life, Wade thinks, consists almost entirely of choices. Flight or fight, walk or run, soft-shell or hard-shell, shaken or stirred. Everything, from the time you wake up in the morning until you crash into bed at night, is a freaking yellow wood, and the road always, _always_ splits. Right now, the beaten path’s the one where he swivels on his heel, runs up the stairs, and beats Nate back to his office before he’s ever spotted. It involves stupid jokes and fixing the broken will form before heading home for the night. 

Instinct screams at him to follow that road, to retreat before Nate catches him watching.

But you can never travel both.

“You never could leave anything alone, could you?” Nate asks from across the lobby. He faces in the window, still a shadow in the glow of the parking lot lights, and Wade feels his throat dry out like the Sahara during high noon. He presses his lips together, watching as the harsh line of Nate’s shoulders soften. “Or do you have an excuse for being down here?”

Wade jerks his head back toward the door that leads into their offices. “We only get crappy one-ply paper towel upstairs,” he answers.

Nate’s snort is soft, reminiscent of a laugh more than anything else, but somehow Wade’s acutely aware of how little _humor_ lives inside it. “And here I thought we were past eavesdropping.”

Wade isn’t sure where the tight feeling in the back of his throat came from, exactly, but it’s definitely uninvited. He swallows around it. “Most people’d argue that I’m not past many things.”

“I’m not most people,” Nate replies. He keeps it mostly-bland in a careful, practiced, lawyerly way, but Wade knows better. Really, Wade might just know Nate too well. “I’ll be up shortly.”

“Nate—”

“Really,” he insists, his phone still clutched in his massive, meaty hand. “I just need a moment.”

“Okay,” Wade agrees, and even nods, a sign of his complete seriousness and dedication to the cause. Nate nods back, but the motion’s empty. Really, all of him’s suddenly empty, leaving behind this empty husk of a person; Wade can’t help but imagine someone sneaking up behind him and sucking out all his joy and energy with the world’s creepiest shop-vac. He’s used to the guy acting like an emotionless robot, sure, but _sadness_? 

Sadness not only counts as an emotion, but it’s an emotion Wade absolutely wants to beat right out of his friend.

He’s supposed to turn around, march up the stairs, and leave Nate to his own demons.

Instead, he stands right at the edge of the rug and just _watches_.

“Listen,” he says after a couple long minutes—epic-length, perpetually-stretching minutes, the kind of minutes that drag out like rubber bands or silly putty—and Nate jerks his head back away from the windows so fast that Wade swears he feels the whiplash himself. The other man’s face segues from surprise to abject anger in less than a full second, though, so Wade throws up his hands in defense. “I just, I know, okay? Get lost, leave you to your devices, let you have negative feelings about your crazy ex-girlfriend or whoever. But I, uhm, I just—”

Nate’s expression tightens further, dangerously close to a full-on brain-explosion like that one gif that pops up on Wade’s tumblr dash every now and again, and Wade— Wade suddenly feels self-conscious. Not about the eavesdropping, and not about the words that threaten to trip out of his mouth; no, he’s self-conscious about his entire existence, from the shirt he’s wearing (muted paisley, five bucks at Goodwill) to the weird little waving motions his hands insist on making. He fixes his hands by shoving them in his pockets, but he’s stuck with the shirt and he knows it.

He’s stuck with so many things, from his stupid uneven voice that reminds him of middle-aged silver-screen stars, to his one and only remaining ball, from his too-long limbs to his crooked toes, from his messy hair to—

He swallows around the lump that still resides in his throat.

Nate continues to stare him down like prey.

“I get that your ex is your ex and god only knows how much of your unholy wrath she deserves,” he says after a couple seconds of silent staring, his heart hammering against his ribcage like a small, trapped animal. _Why_ it hammers like that, well, that’s totally anybody’s guess, but the longer it pounds, the more it chokes the air out of his lungs and throat. He frees one hand to scrub fingers through his hair. “Well, I mean, I don’t _totally_ get it. I don’t have many exes. Arguably, I don’t have _any_ exes, unless Sammie Pierson in the tenth grade counts. And she—she wasn’t a she at the time, by the way, but that’s a very long and complicated story that requires at least three beers to tell—only really dated me because I was the only person willing to date her. Not that it lasted past the third week, because, well, there were some weird incompatibility issues totally unrelated to her sexual identity that she was working through, and—”

“Wade.” For the first time in a year and a half of unrepentant bickering, Nate’s voice is both extremely even and extremely quiet. Like a whisper through winter branches, where you’re not sure whether it’s your name or the wind.

Except there’s no wind in the lobby of their building, and Nate’s staring right at him.

Wade drags in a breath, holds it for a few seconds, and then releases it very, very slowly.

“I maybe don’t know what it’s like to have an ex,” he continues, and the second surprise of the night is how caught and quiet his own voice sounds, “but I know what it’s like to be a kid of parents who, you know, went in two different directions. Or, at least, to be the kid of a mom who left a note when he was ten and then never looked back, but, I mean, that’s not a far cry from parents who split up, or divorce, or whatever.” 

When he raises his head, it’s actually pretty easy to meet Nate’s eyes. He stands there, his head tipped up a few inches, and he definitely never blinks away. In fact, blinking away never enters his head.

Really, the only thought that shoves its way through his scattered, useless brain is how badly he wants to maintain eye contact and _not_ look away.

He wets his lips. “Venom like that, it can screw a person up inside, you know? The parent-person, not the kid person. It can make life really hard, it can—” He shakes his head, totally unaware that his fingers are back in his hair until his hand falls limply at his side. He wants to stare at it like the traitorous limb it clearly is, but the choice between his arm and Nate’s face—soft, half-shadowed, still-watching—is a super easy one. “But venom or no venom, it’s never the kid’s fault. Like, no matter how fucked up stuff gets, it’s just never, ever the kid’s fault.”

For one brief, almost imperceptible second, Nate drops his eyes to the floor, and in that second, Wade swears he catches the flicker of some unnamable emotion. It softens all of Nate’s features, finding fine lines and the other, more delicate features of age that somehow usually hide behind the man’s stony exterior. His fingers flex around his cell phone, his chin tightens, and when he looks back up—

When looks up again, Wade watches as an endless feedback loop of emotion cycles through them, alternating between sadness, frustration, anger, helplessness, the unnamable emotion from a second before, and something that smells a tiny bit like hope.

“I know,” he says quietly, his thunderclap voice hardly a murmur in the cavernous room. 

“I figured,” Wade replies, his shoulders twitching into an unstoppable shrug, “but knowing and remembering are sometimes very different things.”

Nate’s barely-there smile, the one that nudges at the very corners of his mouth and only _just_ touches his eyes, feels like a breath of fresh air in the cold, silent, glass-walled tomb of a lobby. “Explains why you always forget if the comma goes before or after the conjunction,” he says.

“Maybe I just do it because I like the way you scribble red all over my work, Nathan Strunk and White Summers,” Wade retorts, and god, he’s so incredibly happy to hear Nate snort a laugh.

 

==

 

Late that night, in the silence of his bedroom, Wade opens a text message and asks, _how do u no when ur happy w sum1?_

_when you stop wanting to be with somebody else_ , Clint replies, and Wade stares at the screen until it locks—and then, for a while longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In comics canon, Nate Summers really does have a daughter named [Hope](http://marvel.wikia.com/Hope_Summers_\(Earth-616\)). However, his wife is also named Hope in the comics, which I found confusing, so I changed her name. Additionally, Nate’s history with daughter-Hope in the comics suffers from what I like to call _oh my god nothing related to Cable even makes sense!_ disease, so a few alterations were necessary. But she is, in fact, a real character. 
> 
> Also, unrelated to the story, I wanted to thank every one of you who cheered me on when I was preparing for the bar exam. As it happens, I passed! I will be sworn in as a licensed attorney next week. It's been a long, hard road, but I appreciate all of your support. I really think I would've fallen apart without so many people spurring me on.


	11. Winters, Summers, and the Places In Between

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade considers the people to whom we entrust our secrets. Oh, sure, there’s hangman, dancing, Angry Birds, and post-it notes with kittens on them, but that’s all fluff. Because as much as we all have secrets, we don’t always reveal them—and when we do, we sometimes still only scratch the surface.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a lot of Wade Wilson pop culture references, including: the song [“Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPOIS5taqA8), [Pyramid Head](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Head), and [You Don’t Know Jack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Don't_Know_Jack_\(video_game_series\)). (As a warning, Pyramid Head is kind of disturbing and could be triggering. I mean, he's a horror game bad guy, so click with caution.)
> 
> The contents of MPU anniversary story “The Yearly” is mentioned below, as well. It’s not necessary you read it, but just in case, you can do so [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/852249/chapters/1649239).
> 
> Also featured in this chapter is a character with deafness. I tried to do good research on deafness, but there is a reason that I am a lawyer and not a professional medical researcher. The endnotes explain some of the thoughts that went into the inclusion of deafness and other medical information in this story. The big block of text at the end is a bit of a spoiler for the chapter, though. Whatever the case, please forgive any inaccuracies—both in terms of the information I provide and in its conflicts with canon.
> 
> And as always, thanks to my amazing beta-readers, Jen and saranoh. They’ve weathered this storm with me, and I could not do it without them.

“Go on, say hello,” Nate coaxes, his voice rumbling through his chest and his big hands fluttering in this weirdly sophisticated dance Wade can’t even begin to figure out. “He won’t bite.”

“I won’t bite _hard_ ,” Wade corrects, and when Nate’s hands finish in their latest collection of jumps and weaves, the redheaded girl plastered to his side actually breaks into a smile.

The chill of the February afternoon sweeps through the parking lot outside the Suffolk County Legal Aid offices, not that Wade notices. Well, okay, yeah, he notices. Are you kidding? It’s cold enough that the sky’s spitting snowflakes, and he found three icy patches just crossing from his car to where Nate’s standing. He’s still impressed he didn’t wipe out, land on his ass, and create the world’s worst first impression for Hope.

Hope, who hovers next to her dad, slight and pale in her big puffy winter coat and ridiculous pink earmuffs.

Hope, who only really looks like Nate when she smiles, this surprising bloom of a grin that splits her face and shows off a couple missing baby teeth.

Hope, Nate’s _daughter_.

To be honest, fair, and balanced—you know, everything Fox News claims to be but fails miserably at—Wade’d never expected the text message until it’d chimed through and nearly knocked his phone off his bedside table. No, he’d started his Saturday morning sprawled out in bed and staring at the ceiling, frozen like somebody who spent the night out in the cold. At least, figuratively frozen; literally, he’d kept toasty warm over his eight hours of dozing-but-not-really-sleeping.

The chime’d scared him, honestly, and he’d almost fallen out of bed in his rush to scramble for his phone. He’d struggled to unlock it, his fingers sleep-clumsy and unfamiliar-feeling, and he’d wondered the whole time what horror awaited. Did Clint want to yell after the random text message about happiness the night before? Had he forgotten about plans with Darcy and now needed to pay for his crimes? Did he totally fail to pay his cable bill for the sixth time in as many months?

So, really, it was totally fair that the waiting message almost shocked him right out of his boxer shorts.

**Nathan ________ Summers:** _How do you feel about bowling?_

Once the shock subsided into a dull haze of confusion and a weird, wriggling feeling in the pit of his stomach, Wade’d rubbed his sleep-sticky eyes and started fat-fingering his way through an answer. Most of the attempt involved muttered swears and autocorrect nightmares, but somehow he managed to type back, _ppl still bowl???_

The reply—that is, the absolute and abject silence that followed his message—stretched on for so long that he’d cushioned his head on one arm while clutching his phone with the other. He’d started to concoct a version of the world where Nate’s message was a dream or a trick, a way to drive him completely batshit insane (yeah, like he really required help on that front). He’d just about convinced himself to nod back to sleep when another message finally came through. 

_My eight-year-old daughter bowls. Call it a personal failing on her part._

Wade’d stalwartly ignored the way that the chime alone caused his pulse to pick up and race to a dangerous level, and also, how his mouth dried out like the Sahara. And if, after reading the message, he’d bolted to sit upright, nearly kicking all the covers off and exposing his bare skin to the chilly February morning— 

Hey, that just happened to be a really weird coincidence totally unrelated to Nate’s text message.

Once his fingers cooperated, he replied, _bsides bein ur kid?_

_Not everyone is perfect_ , Nate’d responded, and Wade’d barely contained his grin. _So, I ask again: how do you feel about bowling?_

And, since _long as theirs bumpers im game_ apparently qualified uniquely as the right answer, Wade’d thrown on clothes and shoes, shoved half a bagel down his gaping maw, and met Nate Summers in the legal aid parking lot.

Or, more specifically, he met Nate Summers and his very shy, very redheaded daughter in the legal aid parking lot, and—

“You’ve got nice teeth, which is really all you need to be a biter,” Wade says, dropping to a crouch right there in the middle of the asphalt. They’re literally the only three people in the lot, thanks both to the fact that it’s eleven in the morning on a Saturday and also to the late-February cold snap, and Wade’s dangerously close to falling ass-first into a thinly-iced puddle. But Hope’s big, bright eyes—two different colors, how awesome is that?—flit back and forth between Nate’s face, Nate’s ever-moving hands, and Wade, and Wade—

Look, Wade will never win a Nobel Prize or manage a perfect game at pub trivia, but he’s not actually stupid. He learned a long time ago that picking up on other people’s tics and body language might help him avoid a punch in the mouth (or worse), and only an idiot’d shelf such a valuable life-skill. 

So, instead of letting Nate finish his translation of the conversation, Wade just leans forward a couple inches and snaps his teeth together. Hope jumps back, surprised, and for the first time in the last two or three minutes, Nate’s hands go totally still. Wade grins at her, faking a snarl and snapping again, and the kid bursts out laughing.

And not the kind of shy, restrained laugh you’d expect from the spawn of Nate Summers, either. Her laugh bubbles like a brook in the middle of the woods, full and delightful, and Wade can’t help his grin.

When he tosses a glance up at Nate, it’s in time to watch the guy stand on the very edges of his own smile. “Ten seconds in, and you make an impression,” he comments, shaking his head.

“Well, I don’t think you brought me along to dress in a Brownies jumper and help her earn the 10-pin merit badge, so I figured I should earn my street cred,” Wade retorts, and he’s immediately rewarded with one of Nate’s low, genuine chuckles. 

Hope’s laughter morphs immediately into a frustrated noise, and Nate glances down at her just as her hands start jumping around with the same practiced precision as her dad’s. They’re both wearing gloves—there’s no room for cutesy little kid mittens when your finger placement matters, Wade guesses—and converse with almost military precision. Wade’s watched little kids sign in the grocery store, since that’s some sort of new-age parent thing for before you kiddo knows how his mouth works, but none of them hold a candle to the way Hope signs to her dad.

Or, come to think of it, how Nate signs down to his kid, smooth and unbroken. Wade wonders for a second what they’re discussing—his stupid joke, his battered home-knit scarf from a girl he’d crushed on all through his second year of law school, the weather?—but he’s clueless about sign language and definitely can _not_ lip-read the words Nate’s mouthing along.

So he bounces to his feet, right then and there, and asks, “How’s her reading comprehension?” 

The conversation in front of him pauses, Nate’s hands still floating in front of him, and Wade discovers all at once what it’s like to be at the epicenter of two sets of super-cautious Summers eyes. Nate’s always been super great at picking apart body language and facial expressions, but Wade’d never expected in a million years that he’d pass that skill down to his kid.

Unless, of course, he learned it from the kid.

Wade drags a hand through his hair. “Just a question,” he swears, because man, the last thing he needs right now is to feel doubly itchy thanks to double the intently-staring eyes.

“She’s eight,” Nate replies, as though that’s any kind of helpful answer.

“Well, yeah, sure, but, I mean— Oh, just stay here.” Wade steps away, thinks better of it, and then sort of sticks a hand out for Hope, a silent gesture he hopes means _stay_ and not, like, _I want to high-five with your face_. He feels their attention on him as he takes off for the legal aid front door at a lazy jog, and again as he keys himself in and disables the stupid alarm with their oh-so-clever access code of _1111_. Seriously, what’s even the point of that?

“What are you doing?” Nate calls out, and Wade holds up his hand again as the doors slide shut behind him. He bobs and weaves around the furniture and ends up behind the reception desk at the lobby, staring at three grayed-out CCTV screens and the dull orange glow of a computer monitor’s power button.

He’s not in it for those things, though. 

No, he’s in it to jimmy open the receptionist’s locked desk drawers, to root around, and— A-ha!

He only realizes he’s said the last part aloud when his voice echoes through the empty lobby.

Oh, whatever.

When he holds out a fan of various-colored pens to Hope—after locking up and everything; like he said, he’s not a total idiot—she lights up like he’s delivered Christmas ten months early. He watches her scan the collection before she picks out two, one that writes in bright teal and the other that promises black glitter. He likes that she’s not one of those girls who jumps headfirst into pink-everything, even if she _does_ pick the pack of Post-It notes with kittens on them. 

Wade pockets the rest of the pens and the heart-shaped Post-Its, aware the whole time of Nate’s unwavering attention. But it feels less like bad attention and more like curiosity, like he’s either exceeded Nate’s expectations or missed the boat entirely.

Funnily enough, that’s how he feels three quarters of the time, at least where Nate’s involved.

“I’ve gotta be able to talk to her,” Wade says as Hope starts carefully lettering something on her pad. The one glance he steals in Nate’s direction proves that his expression is almost entirely unreadable. Wade swallows around the weird ball of nerves that’s suddenly closing up his throat. “What?”

“Nothing,” Nate says, but his voice sounds weird and quiet, totally unlike normal Nate. Hope tugs his shirt—a sweater, actually, tight and black and emphasizing the sheer _mass_ of him—and then immediately shows off her first filled-out note. The quiet in Nate’s eyes—because it’s not just caught in his expression or his voice, it’s in all of him, like a hush’s enveloped him and wrapped him up tight—breaks, and he chuckles. “Wade,” he replies indulgently, the voice of a father who’s said the same thing ten times now.

Wade watches and discovers, officially, what his name looks like when finger-spelled by one of Nate’s hands. He tries not to fixate too hard on that, or on the precise little-girl handwriting of _what do I call him?_ on Hope’s notepad. 

“You can actually call me whatever you want,” Wade offers, not bothering to find a pen and scribble out his own answer to the question. Nate immediately translates, his practiced ease with sign language almost distracting and definitely hot. Seriously, Wade catches himself wetting his lips at the sight of him, and that’s probably unhealthy, especially around the guy’s kid. Hope shoves her pen and notepad into her pockets to sign something back, and for a couple seconds, they carry on a conversation without a word.

Wade wants to feel left out, or paranoid, or maybe even jealous, because here’s a guy who can literally live in his own little world with his kid and jump into totally secret conversations. But instead, he feels weirdly privileged and, you know, _lucky_ , like he’s discovered a secret. It’s private and special, Nate’s kid and Nate with his kid, and Wade’s part of it.

At least, sort of.

Nate chuckles and rolls his eyes. “Hope’s decided to call you Batman,” he says, and when Wade blinks at him, gestures toward his sneakers. His battered, beat up, absolute favorite sneakers, the ones with the Batman laces.

Wade grins. “Good eye,” he tells Hope, and offers her a high five.

He suspects that some eight-year-olds are probably past the point of giggling at a stupid high-five offered by a stupid stranger, but not Hope Summers. No, Hope lights up like a damn nuclear power plant and high-fives him like her life depends on it.

“I like her,” he decides, glancing up at Nate.

“Then this was probably a horrible idea,” he returns, and starts steering them toward his car.

 

==

 

“I’m pretty sure the dance moms are trying to glare holes in the back of our skulls,” Wade mock-whispers from the top bleacher in the elementary school gym, and then watches as Nate tries to bite down on a smile. Their coats, hats, mittens, and the rest of their winter accoutrements (a scarf for Wade, Hope’s parka and accessories for Nate) are piled up on the bench below them, creating an artificial wall between them and the gaggle of pretty annoyed-looking women cluttering up the first and second rows. The gym floor itself consists mostly of little girls, all of them easily under ten, and two very frustrated college students trying to corral them into a straight line.

Wade wishes he’d brought popcorn.

Below him and Nate, a blonde woman with an incredibly low-cut sweater leans over and whispers something to her neighbor. The neighbor’s head of short-cropped brown hair flips around immediately to eye Wade and Nate. Wade finger-waves, and Nate sighs, which is absolutely and totally an invitation for Wade to lean far, far over until he, too, is in whisper-range.

Short-cropped hair twists back around and resumes her conversation with low-cut sweater.

“They’re probably plotting our death right now,” Wade murmurs, this time at a respectably secretive volume. “Powering up their laser-eyed stares or something.”

“They can’t glare holes in the backs of our heads when we’re facing them,” Nate says dryly. He almost sounds frustrated or fed-up, but not to Wade. No, see, Wade’s familiar enough with the little lift to his voice and the twitch of his lips that he can tell, mercifully, that Nate’s teasing. Joking, even, like a normal human being.

Like somebody Wade’s actually really fond of, not that he’d admit that aloud or anything.

One of the college students whistles at a pitch usually reserved for very naughty dogs, and all ten of the little girls, Hope included, snap into line. Wade suspects that Hope’s mirroring her little friends, trying to match their irrepressible goofball streaks.

Hope, it turns out, is kind of an irrepressible goofball in her own right.

In fact, thanks to a morning of bowling and a delicious lunch of enormous sandwiches at a deli Wade’s never before heard of, Wade’s discovered a whole _lot_ about Hope Spalding Summers, including:

1\. Her love of _Harry Potter_ , playing board games, 1990s-era Disney films, and _Lemony Snicket_.  
2\. Her fantastic penmanship (at least, for an almost-nine-year-old)  
3\. Her status as an almost-nine-year-old, so please, Nate, stop claiming she’s eight.  
4\. Her inability to read what Wade writes, no matter how neatly he prints.  
5\. Her incredibly well-rendered stick figure drawings (again, for an almost-nine-year-old).  
6\. Her stupid-but-awesome (her words) lip-reading lessons that have her almost able to follow conversations—almost.

Down on the gym floor, the kids start stretching, all of them following their teachers’ instructions like little leotard-wearing soldiers. Within a few minutes, it’s pretty clear that the class is a mix of kids with and without the full use of their hearing; one of the instructors supplements her instructions with signs and non-verbal cues. One of those cues, actually, involves snapping at Hope and shooting her a dirty look when she and a classmate start flashing one another ridiculous funny faces. Wade tries not to grin too hard at that one, but he’s pretty sure he fails.

It’s also clear, once the stretching evolves to weird foot placements and other contortionist-type moves, that Hope’s probably the most independent of the bunch. There’s no running back to the bleachers for attention, or crowed demands that Nate track her every move from across the gym, even if she does offer him and Wade some pretty winning smiles as they transition from one position to the next.

Wade’s not sure whether it’s her deafness or her Summers family DNA that’s ensured eight-year-old—sorry, sorry, almost-nine-year-old—Hope’s already her own small human person, but Wade likes it.

He’s less enthused about how the dance moms keep twists around to eye him and Nate up on their bench, though. No, that makes him feel a lot like a wolf in sheep’s clothes, here to cull the herd or something.

“Nadine and Brett usually bring her,” Nate says after low-cut sweater’s checked them out for the twenty-fifth time, almost like he’s reading Wade’s mind or something. Wade stops running through his collection of filthy _here to eat the lady sheep_ jokes to glance over. Nate’s reclined back against the cinderblock wall behind them, slightly slouched and comfortable. That, plus the jeans and the comfortable shoes, actually works on him. Come see a softer side of Summers, or whatever. “Even when I have her for the entire weekend, they pick her up and bring her. But with Nadine on bed rest—”

“Bed rest?” Wade blurts. Unthinkingly blurts, by the way, because if he’d stopped and used his brain for ten seconds—

Well, for one, he wouldn’t be victimized by Nate’s very soft, very considering glance. And, for two, he wouldn’t hear the weird, quiet quality in the guy’s voice when he answers, “Pregnancy.”

But, of course, since Wade’s brain is pretty much Swiss cheese on the best days and also since he’d spent way too long thinking about how soft Nate’s sweater looks rather than about the dangerous interaction between his mind and his mouth, he avoids neither of those things. And he’s stuck, sitting there, staring, high above a sea of Facebooking, Instagramming, video-recording Stepford moms.

He wets his lips. “So, uh, your ex,” he starts to say, but his voice sounds unfamiliar. Like learning a different language or something. He drags his fingers through his hair. “I mean, I guessed maybe the remarriage, but she’s, uh—”

“Having more children with someone other than myself?” Nate asks. Weirdly, there’s a crooked little smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “You can say it. I’m past the point of openly weeping while rending my garments.”

“Yeah, well, like I said: Sammie Pierson’s my only _real_ ex, and we never talked about kids.” Nate’s mouth kicks up in something that mimics a full-on smile, one that touches his eyes, and Wade realizes suddenly how rare those smiles really are. He flops back against the wall. “Which, by the way, is totally why I failed the ‘treat a normal chicken egg like your baby’ unit in health class, because Sam thought I had Aloysius—”

“Aloysius?” Nate repeats.

“—I thought she had him, and boom: Sam’s dad had omelets for dinner that night.”

A chuckle runs through Nate, low and rumbling, and Wade can’t help but crack his own smile. “I consider myself fortunate that no one has roasted my daughter.”

“Yet.”

“Yet.” 

Down below, a slightly tinny Kidz Bop rendition of a pop song blares over the loud speakers, and Wade glances down to watch the instructor girls arrange their charges in a slightly crooked line. One shouts out a countdown while the other mirrors it in sign, and it’s sort of impressive when spoken and signed language collide to create a perfect confluence of little girls kicking, stepping, and bouncing to the music.

It’s weirdly cute. Like, not the kind of cute that threatens to rot your teeth out of your head, either, but the softer kind. It sneaks up on Wade like a virus, infiltrating parts of his gut and his chest he’d always declared impregnable, and he ends up just slouched there, watching clumsy little kids slip around and dance in their socks.

“Nadine always wanted a large family,” Nate comments suddenly. The song almost completely envelopes his voice, but sitting close enough that their arms brush, Wade catches every syllable. Nate’s focused on the dancers, too, his eyes totally trained on his daughter, but he keeps talking anyway. “I still worked at the university’s legal clinic when Hope was born—long hours, student calls and meetings in the evenings, frustrating cases. I was everything a mother with an infant doesn’t want her husband to be. And then, Hope herself was . . . ”

He gestures instead of finishing the sentence. Wade rolls his lips together. “Deaf?”

“Difficult,” Nate offers. “But deaf, too.” His expression shifts, the usual hard lines of his face smoothing out. Wade wants to reach over and touch him—not exactly a foreign urge, since he’s sort of mastered the art of the drive-by hug at this point—but he and Nate, they’re not those kinds of friends. He settles for nudging his knee against Nate’s thigh, and the steady pressure of Nate returning the favor long-term. “There was always the possibility, but after all the testing, and the fact she inherited it from me—” 

Wade can’t help but blink at him. “From you?” 

“I didn’t go gray at thirty due to an especially scary haunted house, Wade,” Nate replies, so perfectly deadpan that Wade nearly cracks a grin. But then those big fingers are running through that shock of silver hair, and Wade—for all his talent at pulling conversations firmly off track and leaving their husks to smolder—can’t think of a single thing to say. “It’s a genetic disorder,” Nate continues after a few seconds, once his hand returns to his lap and his attention wanders back out to Hope and the other girls. “Characteristics include prematurely gray hair, a patch of white hair, mismatched eyes, and hearing loss. The hearing loss is among the less-common traits. I think we assumed— Well.” Nate shakes his head lightly. “I know what Nadine assumed, at least.”

Down on the gym floor, Hope loses her place in the surprisingly-complicated routine for the first time. Wade watches her hesitate for a second, watching the other girls until she finds her place again. The signing instructor’s hand-flap must include some kind of praise, too, because the kid’s grin practically twinkles. When she casts her eyes up in their direction for the first time in, what, twenty or thirty minutes, she’s rewarded with a tiny smile and wave from her dad.

Wade hates the way that tiny smile turns his insides to something indescribably molten.

“We divorced when Hope was two,” Nate carries on, almost like he never paused the conversation. “She remarried a year or so later.”

“And kept having kids while you watched,” Wade says. He wants to be surprised at the bitterness that seeps into his tone, but he’s not. No, he saw that one coming like a wide-load semi-truck with extra lights and blinkers on.

Nate snorts a tiny laugh. “I certainly didn’t watch, thank you.”

“You know what I mean,” Wade retorts, and elbows him. The snort transforms into another distant-thunder chuckle, leaving Wade to roll his eyes and also firmly ignore the way his elbow is lodged into the firm plane of Nate’s side. “You wanted more kids, though, right? A big Summers clan to, I don’t know, reinvent the world in your own image?”

“Honestly, no.” Nate shifts when he glances over in Wade’s direction, trapping Wade’s still-poking elbow against his arm in a way that almost looks like the prelude to some kind of sappy teenage handholding. If, you know, either of them fit the _sappy teenager_ bill. They don’t, so they stick to being two guys with their arms pressed together on the top-most bleacher of the elementary school gym. Try turning that into a Disney channel original movie. “Nadine may have wanted a large family, but I knew once Hope was born that she would be more than enough. Plus, I don’t expect to be in the position to have more children soon—or, arguably, ever.” He shrugs slightly, but his eyes never drift away from Wade’s face. “I don’t need a half-dozen theoretical children to be happy.”

“Just Hope?”

Wade’s not sure why the question falls off his tongue like that—he knows the answer, what with Nate practically gift-wrapping it for him and everything—but there he is, blurting out unthinking questions yet _again_. He considers apologizing or back-pedaling, something to make up for his total lack of filter, but then Nate’s mouth twitches. Not into a smile, necessarily, but something softer and darker, something that drags Wade under the choppy surface of the sea and leads him to feel like he might be drowning, at least just a little.

After all, his lungs stop working, totally forgetting how breathing works, when Nate answers, “And a partner, provided it was the right person.”

Wade almost lets the tide of surprise bowl him over, throw him around like a piece of driftwood (hey, as long as he’s using a seafaring analogy, here, he’s riding it to the damn bank and you can’t actually stop him), but in the end, he can’t. Because the longer he sits there, eyes locked with Nathan Destroyer Summers—not his middle name, by the way; Hope’d suggested William as a potential contender, but Wade’d known by her grin that the hastily-scribbled note was a lie—the more he remembers a day in the middle of January, and a cold breakfast burrito. 

He’d loved that burrito. Until it went all icy and inedible, that is.

He pulls in a breath and holds it for a second before he says, “I thought you didn’t want to be with anyone. I thought you never even _thought_ about what it’d be like to have somebody else in your bed at night.”

A dozen things happen before Nate speaks again, but every last one really only counts as white noise in the background. The Kidz Bop song restarts, one of the girls falls and bursts into tears, one of the moms snaps at her daughter to stop screwing around. A phone plays the opening strains of Britney Spears’s song “Toxic,” the song on the loudspeaker _re_ -restarts, the mom with the ringing phone answers it. But none of these things compares to Nate’s steady, ice-blue stare, or the purse of his lips, or the way Wade feels like the room—or maybe just his chest—is about to implode.

“Saying something,” Nate finally replies, his voice hardly above a whisper, “is not the same as meaning it.”

And when he turns away this time, he never glances back over.

 

==

 

“You don’t need to get defensive, Nathan,” Brett Cunningham insists, punctuating every word with a tiny, definitive hand gesture. Wade swears he’s trying to create his own form of emphatic sign language, one where certain wrist-flicks constitute exclamation points or question marks. Maybe an ellipsis, too, but that’d need to be in the advanced course. “But it’s unnecessary constantly subject her to—”

“To what, exactly?” Nate prompts, and that’s when Hope tugs on Wade’s shirt and immediately thrusts the notebook into his lap.

The legal aid parking lot’s dark tonight, thanks primarily to the horrendousness of winter and also one very temperamental street light. The light in question keeps flickering, on for five minutes and then off again, creating a very weird _Saw 27_ shadow effect in the back seat of Nate’s car. Wade keeps his door cracked open a couple inches with his foot, allowing in a steady stream of frigid air but preventing a full-on horror movie scenario from interrupting a very intense game of Hangman.

What?

You want to go join in on Nate’s argument with his wife’s mousy, glasses-wearing, string-bean replacement-Nate? You enjoy that. Seriously. Just do Wade and Hope a favor and supply the popcorn first, because they’ll enjoy the hell out of the show.

Wade scowls at the collection of empty blanks on the fresh sheet of paper. “Really?” he demands, and Hope cocks her head at him. He tugs one of the kitten Post-Its off the stack and scribbles the word down for her. Hope breaks out into a grin, followed promptly by an emphatic nod. He balls up the note, pings it off her head, and ignores her giggles as he suggests an E. But, because Hope sprung in part from Nate Summers’s loins, there are no Es in the puzzle.

Or As.

Or Rs.

Or— _Are you trying to make me crazy?_ he writes, and Hope laughs aloud when he sticks the note to her forehead.

She’s adding the note to the collection stuck to her shirt—one reads _#1 dancer ever in the history of everything_ , one is Wade’s interpretation of two stick-figures sharing a high-five, and the last one says _ask me about my dad the robot_ —when the door on Hope’s side of the car flies open. She and Wade both jump, and Wade thinks he catches a tiny flicker of guilt climbing across Nate’s features before he pulls himself back together. It reminds him of watching a movie gag reel and witnessing the actor losing his line right before he bursts out laughing.

Except Nate fails to laugh.

“Time to go,” he says without signing, and Hope must recognize something about his expression because she immediately sighs and unbuckles her seatbelt. There’s a second where Wade thinks she might argue about it—she keeps casting her eyes across the parking lot to where Brett’s looming with a pissy look on his face. He looks more like a guy who just sucked all the juice out of a lemon than a supportive step-parent. Wade leans over and hazards a wave, but all that really accomplishes is turning Brett’s pinched citrus face into a full-on glare.

“Don’t encourage him,” Nate mutters, slinging Hope’s sparkly purple dance bag over one of his impressive shoulders. “I can already hear Nadine shrilling at me tonight after Hope’s told her about our—”

The next word is _day_. No other word even fits in the sentence, not when you consider context and the accepted uses of the English language.

But Nate never finishes—and Wade never helps out—because Hope is hugging Wade around the neck.

It’s the sort of drive-by death-grip hug you expect from little kids, sure, but Wade’d never expected one from Hope Summers. He lets her cling for a second and then wraps arms around her, squeezing her as tight as he thinks is probably allowed. He’s pretty sure that Brett’s eyeing the whole situation like he might need to call 911, but right this second, that absolutely and totally does not matter.

Wade can count on one hand the number of little kids who’ve trusted him enough to actually _hug_ him. And none of them had downy-soft red hair he could press his nose into for a second before releasing.

“Take care, okay?” he murmurs without really thinking about how Hope can’t hear it, but when she lifts her head, Nate translates. Hope nods, flashes him another winning smile, and then lets her dad guide her across the parking lot for the hand-off. With both the doors open, the weather inside the car almost definitely counts as frightful, but even without delightful fires, Wade feels warm from the inside-out. 

It grows three times its size, Grinch-style, when Nate literally scoops his kid up and hugs her goodbye. 

Wade ends up watching Brett and Hope speed away in a boring beige sedan, his back pressed to the side of Nate’s car and Nate at his shoulder. They’re quiet for a stupid-long time, watching as red brake lights fade into memory, and the hum of the engine mingles with the usual traffic noise of a Saturday evening. He tries to come up with something to say—something funny or poignant, something to help with the way his stomach and chest empty (and if _he_ feels empty, what about Nate?)—but the words keep sticking just behind his teeth. Sweeping his tongue along them doesn’t really help, either.

Then again, Nate’s stock still and silent at his side, so maybe he’s not alone in the whole sticky-word scenario. He contents himself with toeing at a crack in the asphalt, instead.

Which is probably why it surprises him so much when Nate says, “Thank you.”

His voice is low, almost a whisper against the winter wind, and Wade brings his head up long enough to glance over. Nate’s eyes are trained on the heavy clouds that blot out the stars, and for a couple seconds, Wade loses himself in memorizing his face. It’s not every day, after all, that the crankiest android you’ve ever met stares up at the sky like he’s waiting to catch snowflakes on his tongue.

“Not a big deal,” he says finally, once Nate’s all he can see even after he closes his eyes.

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true. I hung out with your kid, bowled, watched her dance around, whatever, but in the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty much child’s play—no pun intended, but actually, that worked out pretty—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Nate repeats with the force of a dozen freight trains. Within a second, he steps in front of Wade, very nearly pinning him to the side of the car. He presses one big hand against the window, right beside Wade’s shoulder, and Wade’s breath escapes in a cloudy rush. “Don’t ramble. Don’t turn this into humility and self-deprecation. Let me thank you.”

Wade can hardly swallow around the lump that’s risen to live in the back of his throat. “Nate—”

“Let me thank you,” Nate says again, softer this time. Wade watches the way his lips move, the shape of them as they formulate each of the four syllables. They’re full and wind-chapped, pink from the cold. They look rough, the type of lips you’d feel after a kiss, and—

And because he should not, under any circumstances, include Nate Summers and kissing in the same thought, he forces himself to look away.

And that’s when he catches Nate watching his mouth with just as much interest and intent.

He wets his lips, an almost involuntary reflex—like yawning when someone else yawns, caught up in the circle of exhaustion (write a song about that, Elton John)—and then watches Nate’s entire expression darken. It’s not the darkness of anger or frustration, either, but one that starts in your belly and burns its way in every direction, surging through your veins like a force of nature. It’s a darkness Wade feels in himself, one that curls his fingertips against the metal of Nate’s car door and radiates outward.

It’s a slow burn, really, until their eyes meet. Until all the layers—onions, ogres, lawyers, pretense—fall away and they’re two people, standing a foot apart and branding one another with flames so hot, Wade swears the ground beneath them will dissolve into lava.

The hand on the window lifts, and Nate’s thumb, gloveless and chilled by the cold, touches Wade’s jawline. Wade follows the motion, lifts his chin a few degrees, and exhales; Nate watches him like an animal watches prey, steady and unblinking—

Until Wade’s cell phone rings.

The muffled strains of “Bette Davis Eyes” pour out of Wade’s coat pocket, but they’re as effective as a rush of cold water. Nate jerks away like Wade’s skin burned him, stepping back once and then again, and Wade fumbles with his phone in his attempts to silence the ringer. His fingers feel clumsy and slow, tripping over one another, and he ends up sending the call to voicemail instead of silencing it.

Not that it matters. It’s pretty clear from the way Nate’s staring at his shoes, hands in his pockets, that the damage’s already been done. “Nate—”

“You should take that,” Nate immediately interrupts. It keeps Wade from tripping over whatever words might fall out of his mouth next, sure, but it also stings. He snaps his lips shut and watches Nate’s shoulders lift. “Girlfriends don’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Girl- _space_ -friend, Nate, it’s not—”

The second their eyes meet, though, Wade abandons the stupid lie. He presses his lips together hard enough it hurts. Ignoring the rueful bitterness that edges its way across Nate’s expression fails miserably, so he lets it transform into a sore spot in the pit of his stomach. 

“I’ll see you Monday,” Nate says simply.

“Sure,” Wade replies, and his cell phone starts ringing again.

He cancels the call without looking—he can do that now, mostly because he knows where the button’s located in relation to his hand inside his pocket—and then, slowly, steps away from Nate’s car. There’s a second where they’re only a foot apart, almost less than arm’s length, but then Nate walks away from him, keys jangling in his hand. He stands there in the middle of the parking lot until Nate drives away, and then for a couple minutes longer. He’s not punishing himself with the cold wind, exactly, but— Okay, maybe he’s punishing himself a little, but you can’t actually prove that.

When he finally pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, it’s chiming with a text. One of seventeen missed texts, according to the lock screen, and that’s not even accounting for the two cancelled calls and their corresponding voicemails. He thumbs through the unlock code, expecting a wide variety of messages, but discovers too quickly that they’re all from Darcy.

That’s not exaggeration, either. Every last one of them, with time stamps spanning over the last two or so hours, are emblazoned with Darcy’s name. 

Wade opens the most recent one, and his stomach drops.

_I’m at the hospital with jane you enormous asshole I need you to call me right the fuck now what is wrong with you_

“So many things,” he tells the air, but then he’s dialing Darcy’s number, pressing his phone to his ear, and heading straight for his car.

 

==

 

“What are you doing here?” a voice asks an hour and a half later, and of course—because apparently, god doesn’t already hate Wade Winston Wilson enough and wants to rub a whole lot of salt in his wounds—when Wade glances up from his cell phone, he finds himself face-to-face with Bobby Drake.

Outside the emergency room entrance to St. Francis Memorial Hospital, everything feels like ice. The bench that Wade’s tucked up onto, the cell phone he’s playing Angry Birds on, the pavement, the wind, the menacing looks from strangers and EMTs who really just want to stand outside and smoke for ten seconds— Everything, all of it, reminds Wade of some sort of Siberian tundra, cold and unyielding as far as the fucking eye can see. The wind whips against his cheeks until his scarf tassels threaten to blind him, but when he shoves them back under the collar of his coat, Bobby’s still standing there.

He’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a ridiculous ski jacket that belongs more on upwardly-mobile thirty-something executives than on a legal aid lawyer. Worse, the cold turns his cheeks a flushed, healthy brand of red, and tousles his hair in a way that Ashton Kutcher’d probably envy.

Wade hates him tonight. Just a little, mind you.

“Wade?” 

“You know how it is,” Wade replies, flinging a yellow bird at one of those stone (or maybe metal?) girder things and missing by what those in Europe call a metric shit-ton. “I figured if I needed to hang out in the cold somewhere, I’d hang out in the place they could fix my frostbite. Maybe save two of my three blackened toes or something.” He never glances up. “I think their ‘lop one, get one free’ sale ends at midnight, though, so you better sign up.”

Bobby chuckles and helps himself to the empty spot on the other end of the bench. Wade considers complaining, but it’s not like he’s using it. Besides, what complaint could he possibly lodge, right now? _I’m being a supportive boyfriend but Darcy wants my head on a pike so I’m trying out support from a distance?_ Yeah, that’d end well. 

“I just came to bring Hank dinner,” Bobby offers after a couple seconds of silence. Wade, for good measure, provides a horrible gagging sound. He assumes (because he’s not actually looking, remember) that Bobby rolls his eyes. “Shut up.”

“Only when you stop being so disgustingly wholesome.”

“It’s not disgusting, it’s supportive.”

“Nine out of ten doctors disagree, there, buddy,” Wade retorts, but the word _supportive_ distracts him. He wastes his black bird by flinging it directly at the ground and swears under his breath. 

Well, okay, he more shouts it loud enough that it echoes into the dark of the night. When he finally steals a glance up and away from the level’s end screen, Bobby’s cringing. He considers apologizing, but somehow, that feels like entirely too much effort.

Especially since Bobby’s post-cringe instinct is to ask, “Are you all right?”

“Me, sure. Dandy. Peachy, even. People still say that sometimes, right? That they’re peachy?” Wade studies the reset level for a moment, completely aware of how closely Bobby’s watching him. It’s creepy, in a way, that all of his closest friends are also his most observant friends. He really needs to reconsider the hierarchy of his friendships.

He flicks a red bird and kills one of the pigs.

“Darcy’s BFF is preggers,” he explains after the bird stops bouncing around. He tries to accompany it with a shrug, but he knows how half-hearted it probably looks. Not as half-hearted as he feels, though, so hey, that’s a nice touch. “She’s due next month. I guess she had some kind of womanly scare thingie. Darcy tried to text and call me about it, I wasn’t around, I—”. He shakes his head and flings another red bird. “She got dizzy, fell, I don’t really know the details. Just that she hit her head and there was a lot of crying. From her, from Darce, maybe from Thor, I don’t know, but Darcy wanted to come sit with her.”

The next bird on the docket is one of those yellow ones, but he misses his target by a mile. He opens the menu and starts the level over, still staring at the screen like it’s his one earthly solace.

Sort of is, really, given that he can still feel Nate’s thumb on his jaw like a brand.

“You didn’t go in with her?” Bobby asks after a couple seconds. _That_ earns him some patented Wade Wilson eye contact. Eye contact and what must be a withering, _did you just fucking say that?_ stare, because Bobby raises both his hands in defense. “What?”

“Would _you_ go in and sit in the E.R. with two totally hot but totally freaked-out women?” he asks. He leaves out the part where one of those totally hot women wants his remaining ball served piping hot to the nearest cannibal. 

Bobby shrugs. “I’m kind of not you.”

“Is that some comment about the gay thing?”

“That’s more a comment about _you_ than the gay thing,” Bobby replies easily. Wade raises both his eyebrows and cocks his head to one side for good measure. As mentioned about six thousand words ago, he’s not actually stupid, and Bobby knows it. He knows it so well, in fact, that he heaves a sigh. “Okay, maybe it’s a little about the gay thing,” he admits. 

“Yeah, well.” Wade tries to sound haughty and superior, very Emma Frost, but instead, he just sounds broken. He drops his head back to his stupid game. “I’m neither gay nor inside. So.”

He runs through the entire level, loses, and then resets it, all without Bobby uttering a single word. Oh, he stays on the other side of the bench like some sort of creepy sandy-haired sentinel—Wade checks twice out of the corner of his eye, just in case he misses something—but he keeps his mouth shut.

It starts to be kind of nice, the companionship and the quiet, before Bobby ruins it by commenting, “I’d think you’d want to be with your girlfriend.” It screws up Wade’s timing on splitting up the tiny blue birds, and he swears under his breath. Suddenly, the game’s the most frustrating thing in the universe, worse than slow torrent seeds and veggie-flavored cream cheese, and he locks his phone. 

Bobby, apparently immune to how normal humans vent frustration, continues on. “If she’s freaked out and you cared enough to come here, I’d think—”

“You’d think a lot of things, wouldn’t you?” Wade demands. He only realizes that he’s stood up when he discovers he’s staring down at Bobby, instead of across from him, and only notices the hand gestures once the cold chaps his skin. But hand gestures remind him of sign language and immediately turn him bitter, so he shoves his hands in his pockets. “You’d think I’d want to be with her, you’d think I’d want to take _care_ of her through this—” Seriously, his _elbows_ are bouncing around instead of his hands? That’s just fucking stupid, body. “—you’d think I know how to handle my crazy and other people’s crazy and _everybody’s_ crazy, but I actually don’t and I don’t think I ever will!”

His voice echoes like a shot in the darkness, bouncing off the hospital’s stone façade and through the parking lot. It mingles with lingering siren calls and the bark of a few ambulance horns, then disappears. Bobby stares, wide-eyed, his lips parted in this perfect, almost cartoony _O_. 

Wade drags his fingers through his hair. “She’s a big girl,” he says, back at the normal level. “She’s awesome. She’ll hardly miss me, and if she does, I’m here. I guess.”

Still on the bench, still staring like he’d just witnessed the world’s best circus sideshow, Bobby nods. Just once, but the kind of head-bob that totally counts as the decision-making kind. Wade braces himself for the lecture, some sort of omnisexual _stand by your (wo)man_ speech meant to inspire him and send him running into Darcy’s arms.

Which is probably why he’s surprised when Bobby asks, “Do you know when I realized I was in love with Hank?”

Wade blinks for a second and then pulls his hands out of his pockets. He checks his pulse on one wrist and then the other. “Sorry,” he comments when Bobby huffs and rolls his eyes. “You didn’t immediately start reading me experts from your ‘How to be a Better Boyfriend’ curriculum, I needed to make sure I didn’t die on the car ride over.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that today,” Wade replies cheerily. Probably too cheerily, because the annoyance drops right off the other guy’s face. He looks graveyard serious, like he’d come to watch a loved one go gentle into that good night instead of to bring a lukewarm tuna sandwich to his husband. Wade sighs. “Okay, how’d you fall in love with Hank, then?”

“Not how,” Bobby returns. “How’s easy: he was cute, he was smart, he was a really good kisser.” Wade gags aloud, and for the first time in their whole conversation, Bobby cracks a smile. “When.”

“Are you seriously going to make me specifically ask ‘okay, when’d you fall in love with him’? Because I swear, today’s been enough of a shitstorm, I don’t need to add to it with your—”

“He caught a cold,” Bobby answers. It severs the rant pretty cleanly, and Wade buttons his lips in surprise. Bobby’s smile transforms into something softer, almost wistful, and Wade wishes for a second he knew what that emotion felt like. “We’d been going out or whatever you want to call it for six or seven months, and he caught this awful cold. He couldn’t sleep, he snored, he got the nurse’s permission to miss class—and you’ve met Hank, he is _not_ a guy who misses class.” And yeah, okay, Wade chuckles a little at that. 

Less at how Bobby plays with his wedding ring, a tic he picked up somewhere over the years and is definitely clueless about. It’s sweet in the weirdest way, and Wade feels his smile slip.

“The only place I wanted to be, the whole time he was sick, was in our room,” Bobby continues, softer than before. “I couldn’t do anything for him, but I hated thinking about him lying there, bored, sick, and miserable, while I was learning about the Civil War.”

“You wanted to take care of him like a nurse in a sexy movie,” Wade comments, trying his damnedest to roll his eyes. And failing, by the way. Trying and failing miserably.

“No,” Bobby responds. He looks up, Wade looks down, and they’re locked there for a moment, trapped in a non-conversation that Wade really, seriously cannot explain. “I just wanted to be with him. Because he wasn’t happy, and when someone you care about’s unhappy, that’s usually what you do.”

In the distance, a siren wails, promising an ambulance’s arrival in the next few minutes. Wade twists his head in that direction, like maybe he’ll gain extreme farsightedness and end up catching a glimpse of the red lights, but instead, he catches a glimpse of the sky. Not much, really, just half the crescent moon and a couple silver stars, but it’s the first break in the clouds all day. 

He remembers Nate staring at the sky, his chin raised as he searched the clouds. He wonders whether Nate’s found this sliver of white in the dark, and whether he’s glancing at it to.

“I’m kind of not you,” Wade says after entirely too long, once the moon’s burned a spot on his retinas he swear he’ll never lose.

“I know,” Bobby replies, but he stays on the bench.

 

==

 

“I really need one good reason why I shouldn’t _murder_ you and leave your body in the deepest trench I can find!” Darcy shouts, and throws her purse at the kitchen table. It knocks over the salt and pepper shakers, an empty Dasani water bottle, and a plastic Princess Tiana cup that’s full of pens and highlighters. Said pens and highlighters clatter to the floor and fan out, an amazing Technicolor realization of Darcy’s overwhelming anger.

Darcy throws her keys at the table, too, and sends a few more of the aforementioned writing implements pinging all over the linoleum.

As luck’d have it, Jane Foster and the still-incubating Odinspawn are fine, which is probably the only reason that Wade is alive right now instead of rotting behind a dumpster outside an abandoned Blockbuster Video store. According to the white-knuckled, angry-faced Darcy who’d stormed out of the E.R. to find Wade and Bobby sitting on that ice-cold bench and playing You Don’t Know Jack on Wade’s cell phone, Jane’s dizziness and fall were both attributed to some late-pregnancy blood pressure problems that none of the three of them really understood. After promising to reduce her stress and the amount of time running around the office (not likely, given that Jane worked for both Banner and her fiancé, two people with crazy-high, crazy-nuanced caseloads—Darcy’s explanation, not Wade’s), the doctors released Jane and her freaked-out support system from their awkward hospital vigil.

And then, Wade’d driven Darcy home in loaded, sizzling silence.

“Darcy,” he starts to say, but Darcy actually kicks the back of her couch hard enough that it shifts, and he cringes. He imagines her high-heeled boot kicking him like that in a variety of uncomfortable places, and the cringe actually transforms into a shudder. In the car, he’d rehearsed a thousand explanations—cycling consistently through somewhat-true, half-true, three-quarters true, mostly-false, incredibly false, and _no human being would believe this in a million years_ versions of his day—but they all die in the back of his throat. 

Darcy deserves better than a lie, and Wade’s spent most of their relationship lying. Also, she’s whipping off her cardigan and tossing it onto a chair, her whole body heaving in frustration, and she’s gorgeous. Like, that’s not a cliché; Darcy Lewis is verifiably girl-on-fire _hot_ when she’s angry.

Also, a little terrifying, but that’s neither here nor there.

“I get that you’re a spaz,” she’s saying, and Wade jerks himself back into reality before he’s forced to forfeit his life by asking her to repeat the next leg of her rant. “I get that you’re—you, and I’ve never once complained about your you-ness, because I actually _like_ it!” When she turns on him, she’s stripped down to a ribbed tank top and her jeans. She also jabs a finger into the air, her sparkly nail polish catching in the overhead lights. “But the _one_ time I need you, you completely flake out? Really?”

“To be fair, the first three text messages only asked me to call, which is kind of—”

“Wade!” Her voice cracks, and Wade steps back into the little foyer area right at the front door to her apartment, because for a second, he swears she’s going to fly across the room and claw his face off. Worse, he realizes in that second that he _deserves_ the precision removal of his stupid face, and that brings the guilt boiling back up to the surface. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“A lot of things,” he answers. He watches anger flash across his face, so he raises his hands. Yeah, like the physical barrier will keep the raw power of her emotions from roasting him alive. “Look, look, yeah, I fucked up, okay? I— My brain was all over the damn place today, I think it was temporary insanity or something. I screwed up, I’m actually pretty sorry about it—”

She snorts. “Implying that there’s a version of this scenario where you wouldn’t be sorry? Thanks.”

“—but, I mean, I showed up, and I think that’s at least a couple points back on the black side of the ledger, all things considered.”

“All things— I am going to throw something at you.” He believes it, too, in that instant, what with Darcy looking a little like the textbook definition of _barely-contained_ rage. She stalks back and forth across her living room, a caged animal waiting on feeding time, and Wade feels his stomach start to sink. 

He can’t name the emotion, mostly because it’s new to him. It’s not fear, or terror, or anything in that range; he learned all those feelings young, then relearned them when he lost his second-favorite testicle, and he revisits them on a yearly basis during his check-ups with Doctor Cho. It’s not helplessness or hopelessness, because he’s knowing those his entire life and never once let them go (despite the suggestion of numerous shrinks during high school and college), and it’s not really dread.

But it’s definitely not the darkness from earlier that evening, the creeping embers of something unmentionable heating every inch of him from the inside out. That darkness feels like a forgotten treasure, now, a lost city that’ll never be dug out of the ashes, something that belongs to someone other than Darcy.

His breath stops for a second when he realizes that the darkness’s never belonged to Darcy. Not once, not even—

“It’s like you’re incapable of having a conversation about anything that matters,” Darcy presses on, her hands slicing through the air, miraculously empty of projectiles. “It’s either we’re having fun and laughing and fooling around, or you’re lying like the world’s cheapest carpet and expecting me to just grin and bear it.” She stops pacing and twists to stare at him, wide-eyed and wild. “It’s Pavlovian, the way you can’t stop skirting the truth!”

Wade opens his mouth, but he realizes as soon as his lips part that he’s defenseless. Absolutely and totally defenseless, because that’s the crux of their whole relationship, right there in Darcy’s spitting venom: he lies, she knows he lies, he can’t help but lie, and round and round and round and—

And then, Darcy adds, “I swear, it’s like you went crazy after the sex thing,” and Wade’s mouth immediately dries out.

He shouldn’t make it about the night he ran out on her. He knows this like he knows his own heartbeat, like he knows exactly how much he can bench press, like he knows his shoe size. He’s supposed to be honest this time around and say what’s actually happening in his head, instead of sullying the one night where maybe everything didn’t entirely suck.

Except yeah, everything sucked that night. Everything always sucks, because he _creates_ suck just through basic proximity and the use of his vocal cords.

Which is exactly why his response is a blank-faced blink and the question, “What sex thing?”

The absolute anger that flashes across Darcy’s face is unmistakable. Somewhere, in some foreign country, a that-language-to-English dictionary must include her face next to the translation of the words _completely pissed the fuck off_ , because Wade feels his heart almost stop. Worse, his heart completely stops when he realizes that under that anger, masked by its force, is a flicker of uncontrolled hurt.

He caused that, he realizes, and his stomach sinks. That unmistakable spike of hurt, that’s entirely and completely on him.

“You know what I’m talking about,” she presses, and her tone’s so snide and half-insulting that most of Wade’s guilt slips right away. “When you screwed me and left in the middle of the fucking night, leaving me to wonder what I did wrong?” He opens his mouth, but Darcy ignores him. “All the lies and weirdness and scatter-brained _bullshit_ dates right back to that night and your half-assed lie about having diarrhea—”

Somehow, Wade holds off his full-body cringe as an internal thing, rather than showing it on his face. “You don’t know I didn’t have diarrhea,” he defends.

“Of course I knew you didn’t have diarrhea! I’m not a total fucking moron, you asshole!” Darcy’s shout rattles some of the random tchotchkes on the nearest bookshelf, and this time, Wade lets himself flinch outwardly, too. She throws up her hands and then rounds the couch, coming straight at him with an extended forefinger. “Is that what you think of me? Do you think I’m so stupid that I can’t spot an excuse at ten paces?”

“No,” Wade says honestly. He steps back until he hits the front door, then presses against it, not that it matters; halfway across the kitchen area, Darcy abandons her pursuit and stalks back into the living room. “No, I don’t think you’re stupid, I just— I think what I was doing, I was—”

“You fuck me,” Darcy continues, rounding on him with enough force that it throws her hair out like a cape, “you lie to me, you never bring it up again. You never talk about it, you never even have the decency to really apologize, whatever. But now? Now, you flake out, ignore my texts, bolt when we get near third base, and I’m stuck with a boyfriend who won’t tell me the truth!”

“I tell you the truth,” Wade promises. He pushes himself away from the door and then lets the motion propel him forward, straight into Darcy’s hand-to-hand combat range. If she swings at him, he’s doomed. (No, he will _not_ hit a girl, thank you.) “I do tell you the truth, most the time, I just sometimes—”

“Yeah?” Darcy challenges, and he suspects that no force in the universe would keep her out of his face right at this moment. “Then tell me this: did you run out of my apartment that night because it was shitty?”

The flicker of hurt crosses her face like the first licks of fire sparking to light on a little kindling tower, and Wade— Wade really is the asshole that Darcy makes him out to be, because he actually stares at her with that face that borders directly on the no-man’s-land between disbelief and _laughing_. “Are you joking?”

The anger returns, which is about the least reassuring transformation in the history of humanity. “ _Excuse_ me?”

“I just—” He shakes his head and throws up his hands. “I mean, you’ve got to be joking, you own mirrors and you probably dance around in your underwear, you must look at yourself at least occasionally and know that you look like you belong on a pay-per-view channel, not—”

“Wade!” she snaps, and Wade clenches his mouth shut so fast, it hurts his teeth. He watches her fists curl into angry little balls of death, and he braces himself for an immediate beating. “This is exactly the shit I’m talking about, and you don’t even see it! Instead of being honest—”

“I’m being totally honest about how you look,” he promises, because he _actually_ is. “I mean, as things I’m going to lie about go, that’s pretty—”

“—you _bullshit_ everyone you meet with your stupid rambling and your idiotic humor—”

And okay, that hits the first nerve in the last ten minutes, because Wade hears it echoing back to him in Nate’s voice, raw and full in the evening dark. His jaw tightens, mostly against his will. “I’m not bullshitting,” he insists, and he hears the edge that creeps into his words.

“Yes, you are!” Darcy’s starting to sound shrill, now, like a panicked bird, and Wade clenches his teeth together. “You run hot-and-cold, you lie through your teeth, you wouldn’t know honesty if it bit you in the face—”

“Stop making it sound like it’s that simple, because it’s not, and you don’t even _know_ how not-simple it really—”

“—and then, to add insult to all possible injury, you also won’t screw me or talk to me about it, which officially makes you the biggest asshole on the face of the goddamn—”

“Because I have scars!” 

Wade means to snap it, to quickly throw the fuel on the fire and then step back, out of the way, but he realizes as soon as he hears his own voice that he’s roared. Actually roared, like a damn lion on the fucking African plain, and he’d feel kind of awesome about the way it rings through Darcy’s tiny apartment if his heart’d stop racing right out of his chest. He feels like he might take flight, or, failing that, spontaneously combust, something violent and insane, and all because Darcy’s staring at him and his hands are shaking and his breath is ragged and—

He breathes in, then out, but the tremble runs through him like a full-body shiver.

He’s not sure what he meant to tell her, what excuse he planned on pulling out of the chamber, but he’s pretty sure this didn’t top the list.

“I—” he starts, but his breath shakes and he ends up curling his fingers into his sweaty palms. Darcy keeps gaping, open-lipped and wild-eyed; he sees her only out of the corner of his eye, though, because his attention’s focused on her totally innocuous (and no longer battle-ready) left shoulder. “I was in an accident—I mean, I guess you could call it that, I don’t know what else to call it—when I was a teenager. Okay? It was an accident, I got burned, and I look mostly like a _Silent Hill_ baddie without a t-shirt on, it’s not—”

He shakes his head, aware in some vague place in the back of his mind that Darcy’s moving. Moving toward him, which is worse than any other possible direction, so he flinches backward. He remembers flinching backward that day all those years ago, too, the shouting and sneers too much to bear as a stupid fifteen-year-old kid. 

“Wade,” she says like a murmur.

Wade swallows and keeps his mouth moving—the only weapon against the truth of the parking lot and the truth of all the feelings that swirl around in his brain, and the truth of why, exactly, he’s literally and figuratively and ecumenically crazy. 

“I mean, I assume that’s what you wanted to hear,” he tells her, his hands so tight that his fingers hurt, “that I’m a fucked-up freak, that I was a fucked-up freak before I even caught the cancer, that I won’t stop being a fucked-up freak just because of you.” His eyes find her face, and worse than all the hurt from before, there’s _pity_ hiding behind her eyes. His stomach churns. “Because I like being with you, I like fooling around with you, I like kissing you, but I also like that we’re _friends_ and that you care about me and I really, really don’t want to get to the point where that stops being part of this. I don’t want to get to a point where you look at me like—like Pyramid Head, like I’m terrifying and broken and so much of a nightmare that we can’t even have a civil conversation about the relative merits of Rose Tyler anymore. You know?”

Oh.

Okay.

That last part, that hits close enough to home that it steals the breath right out of his core, because parking lots and burritos aside? Darcy’s his _friend_.

Darcy’s his friend, and he cares about her, and the thought of losing all of that because of him or someone else, it’s—

“I didn’t know.”

Darcy murmurs it, a whisper more than actual words, and Wade immediately feels like the universe’s biggest jackass, full of guilt and misery and that unidentified emotion that hollows him until he’s nothing. He watches her shove her hands in her back pockets, watches her shoulders slump and soften, and when she stares at the floor? Yeah, he follows her eyes right down.

“You’re quirky and funny,” she continues, the words sounding sticky like taffy in the back of her throat, “and I figured that was just _you_ , not—”

“The result of medical conditions and the constant fear of everyone thinking you’re a hot mess?” She flinches a little, and Wade lets out a long breath. “I— The lacrosse team knew, some of them, because of locker room shit, but other than my doctors, I don’t—” He can’t figure out what he wants to say, exactly—he thinks of a quote from one of Darcy’s favorite books, one about thoughts transforming into constellations—but he knows he wants it to stop. He wants a quiet, dark room, he wants his heart to stop aching, and he wants his life to reassemble into sense.

It used to make sense, you know? Until that morning in the conference room with Stark on TV, Wade actually thought his life made sense.

He shakes his thoughts free of cobwebs and tries again. “It’s not something I ever wanted to run up the flagpole,” he finally says.

Darcy’s mouth tips up into a tiny, tiny smile. “It’s a flagpole, now?” she asks.

His attempt to smile must not sit too fully in the _fail whale_ category, because somehow, it inspires a tiny twinkle in Darcy’s eyes. “You’ve called it worse things,” he responds, and listens to her sort of laugh.

 

==

 

“At some point,” Darcy says in the light of her bedroom, her ribbed tank-top forgotten on the floor along with her socks, Wade’s shoes, and a number of other clothing items not really worth listing, “I’m going to want to know more about what the hell happened today.”

“At some point,” he immediately agrees, distracting her with a pair of strategically-placed lips and hoping to hell and back that _some point_ never actually rears its ugly head.

 

==

 

Hours later, after future points are thoroughly forgotten and mouths no longer need to serve as distractions, Darcy runs her fingers over the topography of decade-old skin graft scars, tracing over the patterns that Wade’s stared at in the mirror since the day he left the hospital like he’s let her in on a secret.

He wants to think of it like that, a great and glorious drawing-back of a curtain he’s hidden behind since before college, something special and close to his heart that only Darcy’ll ever know.

Instead, he thinks of a redheaded girl who laughs at his jokes, and the dad who picked her up to hug her goodbye.

He wonders a lot about the significance of secret-keepers, after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally didn’t plan on addressing Nate’s prematurely silver hair in this story until I read the book _Reconstructing Amelia_ , which features multiple characters with a genetic disorder named [Waardenburg syndrome](http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/waardenburg-syndrome). Waardenburg syndrome causes, amongst other things, prematurely gray hair. I decided I wanted to use this to explain Nate’s hair—a real-life reason for Nate’s appearance and a nod to all of the physical problems that Cable faces—and started researching the condition. I discovered that some level of hearing loss is somewhat common with Waardenburg and decided it might be fun to apply this to Hope. Maybe I’ve officially stretched canon too far, I’m not sure, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
> 
> I researched Jane’s dizziness and fall months ago, and my findings were reduced to a single sticky note which now reads “Jane scare—heart races, dizzy, falls—BP issue needs reduced stress/feet time.” I cannot tell you anything more than what appears on that sticky note, but I assure you, it is grounded in some sort of research.
> 
> Wade’s scars are not my own creation, but those of perpetfic. Perpetfic, who is one of my oldest and dearest friends, has in fact written a coda for this story that she will be posting after I finish writing it. (Some of my planning of this story happened last December when I was visiting her; really, she’s responsible for this story more than anyone.) She introduced the idea of the scars in the coda, I asked permission to bring them up in this story, and it all came together.


	12. You’re Hot and You’re Cold, You’re Yes and You’re No

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade engages in some mildly risky behavior and requires rescue. Not on purpose, necessarily, but— Okay, maybe a little on purpose. Look, self-preservation is hard, and being honest with yourself is even harder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fact-finding Wade engages in during this chapter is probably not totally legal and not something I’d recommend for a defense attorney. Chalk it up to my creative license.
> 
> Constant and enduring thanks to Jen and saranoh, with whom all things are possible. Or at least, with whom all typos are caught.

“Can you please for one day stop looking at me like I’m fashioned out of hand-blown glass and might shatter when you glance the other direction?” Wade demands, throwing his balled-up sandwich wrapper in the plastic sack meant to double as a trash can.

“Okay,” Bobby Drake replies, but he’s a fucking liar and they both know it.

It’s a cold day, way too cold to be sitting outside the super-shady Park West Apartment Homes in Bobby’s sensible black Nissan. They’re drinking shitty gas station coffee and pretending like the three-days-past-sell-by ham sandwiches with the gray meat and the unnaturally-orange government cheese actually counted as food, but they’re sort of failing at that second part. Or at least, Bobby’s failing at it, because his sandwich is only halfway finished.

Then again, Bobby’s one of those human beings with _standards_. The only free-or-reduced lunch he’s ever encountered is one that his husband bought him on their platinum card or whatever.

“Please don’t tell me you’re eying the rest of this disgusting sandwich because you want to _eat_ it,” Bobby grumbles when he catches Wade staring at the curled-up corner of his plastic carton. He proves his disgust at the whole idea by sliding the thing along the dashboard and just out of Wade’s reach.

“Didn’t your mom ever lecture you about those starving kids in Africa?” Wade retorts. He tips back his so-called “cappuccino.” Nothing that spurts out of a machine like some kind of extra-frothy diarrhea deserves the title “cappuccino.” “Their big bellies actually mean that they’re hungry, not that they’re well-fed and adorable.”

“For food, not ‘synthesized ham product,’” Bobby returns, scowling. His face-crumple isn’t quite to the level of an elderly man in need of some ex-lax, but it’s a close call.

“Waste not, don’t end up hungry in three hours not,” Wade counters oh-so-pleasantly, and Bobby rolls his eyes before reaching for his own faux-hazelnut coffee. Wade attempts to sneak in and snatch the sandwich away—on principle, not because he’s looking forward to more “imitation mayonnaise sauce”—but all he earns is a super-swift slap to the back of his hand.

But hey, a slap means he can feel warmth in his skin again, so small miracles or whatever.

In Bobby’s extra-grumpy and unusually unpleasant defense, the stakeout thing didn’t exactly originate in his pretty little head. In fact, it hadn’t even originated in Wade’s decidedly less-pretty and certainly at least moderately-sized head. No, the whole thing’d sprung fully-formed from somewhere under Carol’s messy female faux-hawk on Tuesday morning while she, Bobby, and Wade all split some coffee cake. Wade remains about eighty-three percent sure that Carol’d “liberated” said cake from a weird mediation training session hosted by the therapist who worked in their building, but when he’d asked, Carol’d just smiled serenely and promised she could eat the whole thing herself.

“It’s a nightmare,” Wade’d complained after she’d started cutting the enormous flat of streusel-topped breakfast pastry—and just the same as he’d complained constantly for the last couple days. Just the same as he planned to keep complaining, too, since consistency is apparently one of those virtue things. Really, lately, everything in the universe deserved its own, perfectly-tailored complaint: the weather sucked, traffic cluttered up the roads every day after work, the self-checkout at Safeway refused to accept his loyalty card, the happy kids creating snow angels in the park laughed too loud, and those fucking Charmin bears—

You know what?

Don’t ever get him started on the vaguely-unhygienic Charmin bears.

Whatever. The point is, he’d complained aloud to Carol and Bobby while sucking raspberry sauce off the side of his thumb. “Stephen King’s next book’ll be about this whole ordeal. _The Missing Witness and the Goatfucker_ , he’ll call it. Thrilling, terrifying, and a _New York Times_ best-seller for twenty-one weeks.”

“That’s oddly specific,” Bobby’d replied, shaking a sugar packet.

“I’m specifically odd,” Wade’d retorted, and then snatched the sugar packet right out from between Bobby’s fingers. Except, because he’d totally forgotten his coffee cup up in his office and because Emma’d put the kibosh on paper cups—saving the environment, one empty gesture at a time!—he ended up just dumping the sugar into a neat little pile on the corner of his napkin.

Carol’d frowned. “What is wrong with you?” she’d demanded, but undermined her serious indignation by asking it with a mouth full of delicious, flaky breakfast cake. God bless whoever decided adding a bit of fruit and cheese to puff pastry turned it into an acceptable morning meal.

“You mean besides the fact he thinks Stephen King is scary?” Bobby’d asked. 

He’d reached for the creamer, too, but Wade’d liberated it from his grip and then took his sweet time adding powdery off-white chalk dust to his little mound of sugar. “I know for a fact that you once called _The Killing_ —and I am directly quoting because the ridiculous hilarity of this phrase is burned forever in my brain like a weird brand or something—‘the scariest show on TV.’”

Immediately, Carol’d choked on her coffee cake. Like, Bobby’d blanched all pale and ghostly, and that’d cracked Wade up, but not as much as Carol’s ridiculous bug eyes as she attempted to avoid death by empty calories. “It was late!” Bobby’d defended, though, because he was _Bobby_ and also because it was either that or pointing out that Carol’d turned the kind of red usually reserved for those who want the Heimlich maneuver. “I watched the whole first season in, like, twenty-four hours. Never mind the fact that the dramatic end music is totally creepy.” Wade’d snorted a laugh, and Bobby’d glared at him. “You cannot possibly use that against me.”

“Isn’t that a cop show?” Carol’d finally asked, proof that her windpipe’d recovered from its run-in with drizzled white frosting. “With the chick in the sweaters?”

“The coppiest and sweateriest,” Wade’d confirmed, and then clapped her on the back when her laughter turned into oxygen deprivation. Again. She really needed to look into lung-strengthening exercises, once of these days.

Once they’d confirmed that Carol definitely was not going to die right there on the conference room floor—and once Bobby’d reclaimed the creamer for his supposedly-legitimate dairy-free purposes—Carol’d finally raised an eyebrow. “So,” she’d drawled, kicking her feet up on the conference room table, “what is _actually_ wrong with you?”

“Depends on how long you have,” Wade’d replied casually. Too casually, apparently, a kind of casual not usually reserved for conversations about your shamefully long list of human failings with fairly distant work friends you really don’t know all that well.

Because Carol’d immediately stopped chewing, her teeth parted and her jaw titled at a weird angle. Bobby’d abandoned his pursuit of the perfect coffee-to-creamer ratio. And both of them, in that creepy unison way patented by creepy children in creepier movies, had then gone on to stare at Wade like they’d never laid eyes on him before. 

Which ended up being pretty much the only reason that Wade’d forced himself to crack a grin and laugh. Like he’d created an inside joke without informing them or something, a bolt of cleverness that they’d chuckle about together in another couple weeks, or whatever. “For the _story_ ,” he’d stressed, snagging a chunk of crumbly coffee cake and shoving it into his mouth. “God, what, did you think I was going to confess all my messy personal secrets? Here? To you two?” He’d laughed again and waved a hand. “Seriously, never going to happen, so we might as well just talk about Luke ‘the Hand’ Martinez, which is a super unfortunate name for a guy who created a goat-sex rumor.”

Carol’d rolled her eyes at that, finally, but Bobby— Bobby, being Bobby, had stared at Wade carefully for the whole rest of their impromptu non-meeting, watching as Wade wandered through the story of Allan’s friend-but-not-really, and the maybe-pictures, and the attempts to contact “the Hand” (and who—show of _hands_ —really thought that was a good nickname?), and the way that Luke kept avoiding the sheriff, and—

Well.

It’s not like Wade and Bobby’d chosen to freeze their nuts off in an Altima on a Wednesday afternoon for their health, now is it?

No.

The answer is no. Not for their health. Wade’s already down a nut, remember. Losing the second one, that’d just be cruel and unusual punishment. And creepy-looking.

“I won’t let you eat my sandwich, so you break out the Pringles?” Bobby cuts in. He clings to his coffee cup like it’s the world’s tiniest and least-effective space heater. They’d run the engine for the first hour, but Bobby’d complained about gas mileage and greenhouse emissions and decided they should suffer in the least-silent silence of all time. 

Wade wipes cheese powder from his mouth. “I popped,” he defends. Bobby stares at him, so he rolls his eyes. “Didn’t they have television in boarding school? Because once you pop, the fun don’t stop, grammatical incorrectness and all.”

He offers the can to Bobby—they’re the cheddar cheese flavored kind, because those are the only _true_ type of Pringle and to claim anything else is heresy and requires you be burned at the stake—but realizes too late that Bobby’s face has softened into that carefully-concerned thing he usually reserves for really sad cases. The guy transforms into this droopy-eyed puppy every time he’s forced to call social services on a little old lady who lives in her own filth, a far cry from the decent-enough lawyer who will actually eviscerate you in open court if you try to lie about your income to avoid child support. He’s a weird dichotomy in and of himself, like two faces of a coin that look similar but aren’t really, and Wade admires it.

A little.

Sometimes.

Definitely not when the concerned eyes are focused on him, though, and double-definitely not when they’re stuck together in a car with literally nowhere to go. Worse, it’s Bobby’s car, and they’re in a part of town where _just be aware of your surroundings_ morphs into _carry at least two weapons on your person until the gentrification project’s more than just a pipe dream_ , so he can’t really escape.

He leans his head back against the seat and closes his eyes, waiting.

Bobby survives an unprecedented ten seconds before asking, “What’s going on with you?”

There are literally a thousand possible answers to that question, ones that range from the absolute truth to horrible, unbelievable lies involving Wade’s very serious concern about global warming’s effect on certain species of pine tree, but Wade settles on the one where he huffs and rolls his eyes like Bobby might just be the biggest idiot on earth. He’s perfected the huff-and-roll through years of tireless question-dodging, and hey, why teach an old dog new tricks when the old tricks work just as well? 

“I told you,” he says, reaching for his coffee. “The only person with any actual, first-hand knowledge about Allan’s close encounter of the goat kind is this guy Luke, who lives in that building there.” Rather than drink, he gestures, sloshing shitty coffee onto the cheap plastic lid and also down onto the side of his hand. The coffee’s lukewarm at best, completely useless against the bitter chill that’s seeping into the car. “But somehow, the guy who thinks that a body part doubles as a decent alias is _also_ the guy who’s managed to dodge my phone calls, my e-mails, and three different process servers from the sheriff’s office, leaving us here, in the cold, when we’d rather be—”

“Not _that_ ,” Bobby cuts in. Wade suspects he only waited to see if the ranting’d ever segue into actual truth, but since the truth—like the Loch Ness Monster—is elusive and hard to ever really pin down, Wade just sips his coffee. He feels Bobby watching the side of his face with piercing lawyer-eyes. He likes Bobby better when Bobby decides to be a person, not a lawyer. “I want to know what’s going on with _you_. With Wade Wilson. I want to know what’s actually happening in your life.”

“Nothing,” Wade responds, and relies on a quick shrug to catapult him entire light years from the truth.

Bobby rolls his eyes, demonstrating once and for all that even Bobby Drake (hyphen McCoy) is capable of basic human annoyance, and Wade steals the opportunity to pull out his phone and open up a random game application. He only really recognizes that it’s Candy Crush after he starts playing it, and that’s totally fine with him. After all, Angry Birds reminds him of the frigid night outside the hospital, and all his word games bring up thoughts of little red-haired girls playing Hangman, and he’d much rather stick with the games that don’t hollow out his gut and leave him feeling raw.

Because the days after the fight with Darcy—long, lazy days filled with lingering kisses, crappy television show off Darcy’s DVR, and a lot (seriously, a _lot_ ) of time in bed—have been perfectly acceptable days. No real complaints from him, except for maybe the discovery that _Sister Wives_ is not nearly as raunchy as the title implies. Even after the weekend faded into the work week and he returned to the usual schedule of client meetings, witness-wrangling, and plea negotiations, he really didn’t have anything to complain about.

But.

He scrubs a hand through his hair as the _no more moves!_ screen appears and restarts the level.

His life, at least on paper, is an absolutely fine, totally acceptable, decent-enough life, right now.

It just doesn’t feel that way.

“How’s Darcy?” Bobby asks after what feels like a full half hour of near-perfect silence, the quiet in the car broken only by Pringle-munching and Wade swearing at his phone. Bobby stares off into middle distance when he asks, but Wade knows he’s a faking faker who really _wants_ to stare at him, instead. Outside the Park West Apartment Homes, a white guy slides into a car with spinning rims and starts to blast the hardest-core rap music Wade’s ever heard. It rattles his fillings, even from across the street.

Bobby watches him pull away. Wade watches the timer that promises him new Candy Crush lives. Twelve minutes and twenty seconds to go.

Now, nineteen.

Eighteen.

Seven—

“Wade?”

“You won’t believe me if I say she’s okay, will you?” he answers. His voice snaps like a tightly-braided leather whip. The nice kind, you know? The _Indiana Jones_ kind, the kind that draws blood the second it hits your skin. He feels the snap as much as hears it, and Bobby must too because he flinches. He even rocks back in his seat a couple centimeters, like Wade’s actually snapped a physical whip in his direction, but hey. When has a physical manifestation of less-than-physical pain ever really dissuaded Wade Wilson? “I mean, maybe if I throw in horrible details, then you’ll believe me. Where do you want to start? The super-satisfying sex? I can even tell you about positions, if that’s what you’re into. Excruciating details about how it all bounced when she—”

“That,” Bobby interrupts, shoving his gloved hands into the space above the steering wheel like he’s bracing for impact, “is _not_ what I meant, but—”

“No, see, but that _has_ to be what you mean,” Wade presses. He throws up his hands, too, then gestures like a wild man, all expansive sweeps of fingers entirely out of his control. When he twists to look at Bobby, Bobby’s frozen in place from something a lot worse than just the awful cold. “Because you ask, and Carol asks, and Clint asks, but you never all talk to one another and compare notes, so you must just want the dirty details!” 

Bobby drops his eyes. Guiltily, actually. Crazy-guiltily, really, and then he keeps his head way, way down like a dog who just got shouted at. It’s kind of vindicating, so Wade keeps going. “I’m okay. I’m never _not_ okay. And the sooner you all figure out that ‘okay’ is a good enough way to live, the better off all of us will actually be!”

He tosses his phone onto the dash hard enough that it bounces around a little before it settles, and then the car pitches into the sort of violently awkward silence that usually lurks around family reunions and office Christmas parties that don’t have booze. Bobby keeps his head low and turns on the engine, but even as the cold blowing air turns slowly to slightly-warm blowing air, neither of them breaks through the quiet.

Wade tries to absolve Bobby of blame, because deep down, he knows Bobby’s a nice guy; when that fails, he tries to focus on other things, like his plans to catch a beer with the Learned Hand Jobs after he finishes up work on Friday. But that falls apart, too, like trying to reassemble a broken jar when you’re missing a bunch of pieces, so instead he just sits there, clenching and unclenching his fingers and staring helplessly at his phone on the dash.

Because even with all the tension pulled taut in the car around him and Bobby, Wade finds it impossible to think about his friends’ collective concern or his frequently-amazing girlfriend or the way his heart keeps racing like it wants to swell up and then smother him.

No, the only thing in the world he can focus on is the one person who stopped asking how he was after they almost kissed in the Saturday night dark of the parking lot—and the fact that the same guy’s not said a single goddamn word to him since. 

Wade’s just about done replaying every too-quick hallway sidestep and silent second of eye contact in his head—because apparently, the idea of a fun, television-style stakeout with coffee, snacks, and witty banter’s turned into an afternoon of self-loathing and a pity party with a Nate Summers piñata—when Bobby asks, “Uh, Wade?”

“What _now_?” Wade demands. At least, in his head, he hopes it sounds demanding instead of defeated. He’s pretty tired of the “defeated” thing.

“Uh,” Bobby says, in a tone that suggests maybe Wade sounded as pissed-off and mean as he felt, just a second ago. “Is that your guy?”

“My _guy_?” he repeats, and wow, it’s impressive that he doesn’t get whiplash from the way he immediately jerks around to stare at Bobby. His face flares the kind of red you can never quite blame on the cold, and he swears his fingertips start trembling. Everything in the last couple days, from the radio silence to Hope’s dance class to the way Nate stared at him in the parking lot, it all rushes up his throat and threatens to bring his ham-product sandwich along with it. “I swear, I mean, first you ask about Darcy, now you’re asking about Nate, I should just—”

And there’s a lot more to that rant, Wade swears it, but then he finally notices that Bobby’s hand is hovering up above the steering wheel. More specifically, it’s hovering for the purpose of pointing, the crooked end of his index finger is directing Wade’s attention to—

“Oh,” Wade says dumbly as he watches Luke Martinez heft a trash bag over his shoulder and trudge toward the dumpster. “ _That_ kind of guy. Right.”

Bobby looks tempted to start talking, something that, as far as Wade’s concerned, is about the world’s worst possible punishment of all time, so he pops the door locks and shoves his way out of the Altima. “The Hand,” as he apparently likes to be called (the asshole), is a tall, beefy guy in a black parka and an off-white scarf. He reminds Wade of a specialty bowling ball, because he’s round, wide, and might just roll down a steep embankment after a good, hard shove. He also huffs and puffs as he tries to toss the dumpster lid open. Just, you know, as long as Wade’s spending his half-walk, half-jog across the street describing the guy in excruciating detail.

“Hey, lemme help you out,” he offers, and Martinez blinks in surprise as Wade grabs the lip on the dumpster lid and expertly shoves it with just enough force that it falls all the way back. It clangs like a gunshot, and Wade wipes his hands on his slacks. “Spent a lot of my formative years dumpster-diving. You learn a few tricks about where the lid’s sort of, I don’t know, tipping point or whatever is.”

Martinez stares at him for a couple seconds. His cheeks are red from either the cold, exertion, or both, and blood vessels create a subway map over the whites of his eyes. Wade wonders just how many empty Doritos bags are in the guy’s trash. “Yeah, thanks,” he mutters insincerely before tossing the sack over.

“No problem,” Wade answers. For a second, they both stand there, Martinez staring him down like he’s a rare and exotic Pokémon that just materialized out of the tall grass and Wade smiling insipidly because you catch more flies with honey (or Balsamic vinegar, whatever). But the longer the second drags on, the longer Martinez looks ready to bolt, so Wade purposely starts patting himself down and frowning. “Shit,” he mutters, fully aware that the other guy’s frowning at him. “So, okay, here’s my deal, right? Girlfriend and I pretty much ripped each other’s heads off in the car, and she left me here to walk home while I’m freezing my tits off, and my cell phone’s totally still on the dash in her stupid fucking Altima.” Hey, don’t look at him like that. The best lies include little nuggets of truth, and Bobby is a kind of girlfriend. Like, you know, in the _best gal pals forever_ sense, or whatever. “You mind if I borrow yours for a second?”

“Uh,” Martinez says. His shoulders tighten up, suddenly guarded, and Wade flashes him his best sheepish grin. He must look appropriately pathetic and hopeless, too, because the guy finally heaves a sigh and digs a beefy hand into the depths of his fluffy coat. “Don’t go calling China or anything,” he instructs as he hands over an iPhone, “because I don’t have that kind of package. And don’t try to run, either.”

“I won’t,” Wade promises, though he’s pretty sure even a one-legged cell phone thief could outrun Martinez on a good day. He unlocks the phone—and if you ever need proof that Martinez’s no pseudo-criminal mastermind, how about the fact that he walks around without a security code on his freaking phone?—and starts fumbling around like he’s not sure how to find the actual phone menu. “Wow,” he says after a couple seconds, flashing the screen in Martinez’s direction. “This is one of those super-fancy iPhones, right? Like, two cameras, video, even a poor man’s Photoshop right on your phone, right?”

Martinez cocks his head very slightly to one side. He reminds Wade of a particularly weird-looking Chihuahua that just heard a high-pitched noise. “Yeah, sure.”

“I mean, you must be sending pictures to all your buddies all the time, right? Showing off, I don’t know, your Starbucks drink or Denny’s breakfast or something. That’s a thing people do, you know that? They use these filters, like— Well, here, maybe I can show you.”

The panic that blooms on Martinez’s face is absolutely unmistakable. He tries to stand on it, brush it off by tossing his scarf over his shoulder and then reaching for the phone ever-so-casually, but Wade’s a trial lawyer. Part of why he’s paid real money on a bi-weekly basis is because he’s pretty good at identifying facial expressions, and panic’s an easy one. He hops up onto the curb next to the dumpster, his sneakers crunching down on mostly-melted gray snow, and holds the phone behind his back. “Afraid of what I might instagram?” he asks, grinning.

It’s definitely not a nice grin. It’s more a feral grin, the kind before a predator swoops in and rips your throat open.

“Who the fuck are you?” Martinez demands. The red in his face doubles, probably out of anger, and when he lunges forward a half-step, Wade again bounces in the opposite direction. It’s pretty clear just from the guy’s expression that he won’t climb over the shitty gray rock-snow unless he’s absolutely forced to.

“If you can’t guess who I am by now, what with all the calls and e-mails and cards left in your mail slot by both me and the fine people at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, then you might be kind of dumb.” Martinez’s fingers flex into angry ham-balls at his sides. His arms tremble, and for the first time, Wade realizes exactly how pissed-off the guy is. He should probably care about that, but he really kind of _doesn’t_. No, what he _does_ do is toss Martinez’s phone from one hand to another. “And from everything I’ve heard about you, you’re not actually stupid.”

Martinez’s jaw flexes, but he stops his slow ascent up the little hill of gravel and crappy snow. Wade can’t decide whether it’s because he really wants to avoid the ascent altogether or whether he’s flattered by the backhanded compliment. Either way, he crosses his presumably-enormous arms over his chest. “And what the hell do you think you know about me, huh?”

“Oh, lots of things,” Wade answers, waving a casual hand. If the phone sort of flops around like he might drop it, well, more power to him. “I know you’re a computer guy. Like, a hardcore talented computer guy. Dropped out of college, what, sophomore year because you got an IT job with a local advertising firm? Sorry about your CEO murdering that teenager and ending up in prison, by the way. That’s _got_ to be rough on business.” Martinez draws his whole body up tighter, so Wade employs the only distractor he’s brought along with him and keeps on talking. “Heard you picked up some tricks at the firm, too. Worked with the visual arts people, even did some mixed media presentations somewhere. Admittedly, I zoned out at that point because this guy I work with walked by, and he was wearing these black slacks that should really be illegal. But, I mean, either way: you’re good with computers, and also with computer art.”

“And?” Martinez asks. The single word _drips_ with challenge. Seriously, he’s packed an entire Coliseum battle royale into one syllable, and now, he’s waiting. Wade knows the type, really, the guys who respond to your pick-pick-picking with growls and glares until you finally earn a high-quality face-bashing. He had the honor and privilege of being beaten up by the very finest of those meatheads back in middle school.

Except Martinez is smart. He’s a meathead who knows computers and impresses his friends—or quasi-friends, since Wade’s pretty sure Allan will definitely be cutting all ties with this bozo in the very near future—with his big brain. He’s—

Wade hates that the one comparison he immediately hones in on is _he’s a lot like Nate, only without the redeeming qualities_.

He tramples on his own stupid, reactionary brain and, very slowly, points the phone at Luke “the Hand” Martinez. “And I think that you were pissed off about Allan Crane stealing your girlfriend,” Wade answers, “and I think you framed him for goat-sex because of it.”

And then, all hell breaks loose.

Martinez surges forward with the force of a pissed-off hippopotamus—hey, those things are fucking _mean_ , watch Animal Planet sometime if you don’t believe him—and Wade’s only choice is to scramble up over the mound of grimy ice-snow in an attempt to get away before his nose ends up smashed into his face. He also tries to open up the photo application on the phone, just to see, but multitasking’s never quite been his strong suit. He fumbles the iPhone, Martinez bellows like he’s been stabbed, and somehow, Wade finds himself standing behind the dumpsters and—

Oh, okay, Martinez isn’t stopping. No, in fact, he’s definitely coming after Wade. Hell hath no fury like a goat-fuck framer scorned, apparently. 

Wade slips a little on the gravel behind the dumpsters, but then takes off into the parking lot.

“I totally get it!” he calls behind him, listening to the heavy thumps of Martinez’s feet on the asphalt. The guy’s not exactly Usain Bolt, but he’s pretty quick for a human bowling ball with legs. Imagine if you _actually_ rolled him down something. “I mean, dorky little hipster convinces ‘Mony—horrible nickname for a girlfriend, by the way, you should really talk to your naming committee about these things—to crack into his skinny jeans and leave you, the smart-as-hell computer guy all high and dry—”

“Give me back my fucking phone!” Martinez roars. Wade ducks behind a conversion van to catch his breath for a second, the back of his head pressed up against a rusty patch. Something nearby smells distinctly like piss. He officially crosses Park West Apartment Homes off his _potential future complexes_ list. After all, even Wade has standards.

Wade also has lungs that miss his long, leisurely fall runs with Clint, because holy crap does the cold air burn as he pants his way through his five-second break. What’s worse is that Martinez appears around the front of the van right as Wade’s acclimated to the burning, and then he’s ducking back out into the parking lot.

This shit never happens on _Law and Order_. Wade thinks it probably never happens to defense attorneys like Sif or Heimdall, either.

“But, you know, facts are facts,” Wade presses as he weaves between cars in the crappy, uneven parking lot, his shoes occasionally losing grip and finding it again only at the last possible second. “And, I mean, Allan’s a piece of work, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a piece of work who definitely doesn’t remember diddling a goat. And drunk as he was—and high, because I’m pretty sure you guys like being high—”

“Fuck you!” Martinez shouts after him, and the _thud_ that follows is clearly him slamming fists onto a car trunk. Well, at least, Wade assumes. It sounds like the right kind of thud, at any rate.

“—I’m pretty sure he’d remember that. I mean, he at least _vaguely_ remembers the thing with Harmony.”

“And so what if he doesn’t remember?” Martinez demands. Wade skids to a stop and twists around to stare at the guy. He’s huffing and puffing, his whole body heaving under that ridiculous parka; the off-white scarf weaves through the parking lot like a snake, abandoned and forgotten in their chase. The phone weighs heavily in Wade’s hand, all of a sudden, so he clenches fingers around it. “I was there, okay? I saw. I saw him fuck around with that goat, and nobody’s gonna tell me—”

“I don’t think you did,” Wade retorts. He points the phone in Martinez’s direction and wiggles it slightly. “See, I work with a lot of guys like you and Allan. Ladies, too, but that’s a less salient comparison point, so let’s stick with guys.” Martinez scowls at him. Wade thinks maybe his slowly-crystalizing lungs are interfering with his brain spitting out the right words, so he shakes the cobwebs out of his usually-functional head. “And all that experience means I’m really good at two things: getting somebody a deal, and spotting a liar. And, I mean, I can wheel and deal for Allan until I’m blue in the face, but I’m pretty sure he’s telling the truth about being black-out drunk and shocked by the goat thing.” He catches Martinez’s eyes. The guy’s brow tightens and crinkles, like he’s really processing the words coming from Wade’s mouth. “And I’m also pretty sure that you and your buddies created the whole nightmare because you were pissed at Allan. Which, you know, I can see. He kind of rubs a guy the wrong way every time he opens his mouth.”

For a second, Martinez’s lips part like he might actually admit to the whole thing. Wade congratulates himself—not every hunch he plays ends him squarely in the _win_ column, you know?—and is about to suggest they sit down on the curb and just hash it all out when Martinez lunges forward again. He’s still a good ten feet away, far enough that Wade’s got a chance to dash out of his reach, but _man_ , he’s sick of the running thing.

“To be fair, I don’t think you expected him to be brought up on felony charges,” Wade says as he scrabbles for purchase on an icy patch. He almost takes the mirror off a shitty Dodge in his attempt to stay upright. He’s pretty sure the owner won’t miss it, given that the car has two flat tires. “That was maybe a little beyond your imagination.”

“Doing animal stuff is a felony?” Martinez asks, pausing with his hands flattened to the shitty Dodge’s equally shitty (well, one assumes) trunk. His round face is blotchy and he’s opened his coat, a sure sign that he’s suffering in their race for phone-related dominance. Wade wonders if maybe the smart IT guy is actually a big enough dumbass to keep evidence on his phone. 

“Yeah, I know, right?” Wade replies. Oh, he sounds just as bad as Martinez. Maybe that’s why quick, clever little mice always end up eaten by stupid, slow-moving cats: they run out of freaking steam. He wipes away sweat with the back of his hand. “You’d think the diseases’d be enough of a punishment, but actually—”

Martinez shoves himself away from the car, probably in a fresh flash of pursuit, and Wade swears under his breath before he starts running, too. Not that he really goes anywhere, though, because he hits another icy patch and this time, falls _hard_ onto the cracked, gritty asphalt. The iPhone skitters over some ice and ends up under a car. It looks unscathed, though—thank god for Otter Boxes—and Wade immediately rolls to reach for it.

Or, rather, he tries to roll and reach for it. The second he plants an elbow on the ground to propel himself over, a meaty hand grabs the collar of his jacket and tugs _hard_. He sputters, the sudden tightness really interfering with that ever-important task called “breathing;” squirming only causes Martinez to tighten his grip.

He looms over Wade, bent at a waist you’d never expect to actually fold that far, his bloodshot eyes wild and filled with an anger so thoroughly incandescent that it could probably power a small city. Wade reaches up and tries to grasp Martinez’s arm, but Martinez uses his free hand to slap him away.

“Allan,” he growls, his voice low and, for the first time in their whole cat-and-mouse game, completely menacing, “is a fucking piece of shit. Harmony’s not my girlfriend, she’s my _sister_ , and nobody plays around on my sister and gets away with it. Especially not when I’m in the next room, and especially not when she’s _seventeen_.”

“Age of consent’s six— Okay, never mind,” Wade croaks. He feels the shape of Martinez’s knuckles pressing firmly into the skin of his throat. He kicks out a leg, a wild attempt to connect with _some_ soft and vulnerable part of Martinez’s frankly enormous body, but all he manages to do is scrape his heel along the guy’s calf. It’s not a meaty, soft calf, either, but pure, corded muscle. 

So much for the usual stereotypes about men in the IT industry. Between Martinez and Nate, Wade’s pretty sure the fat, pimply nerd in his mom’s basement is a complete urban legend. You know, like falling properly in love.

“I’m not helping you get that dickhead off,” Martinez continues, and either Wade’s hallucinating or there are actual black spots starting to pop up in his vision. “I don’t care how many cops you send here, I don’t care how many times you come back and pretend to be somebody you’re not, but Allan, he is _getting_ what he deserved, and—”

“Mister Martinez, please step away from Mister Wilson,” a voice that sounds distinctly like Bobby’s interrupts, and Wade flicks his eyes over in that general direction. He can’t exactly turn his head, thanks to Martinez’s ham-fist permanently indenting his trachea, but he’s pretty sure that the person standing a couple feet away is actually Bobby Drake. He looks appropriately metrosexual, with his jauntily-cut coat and his skinny-ass scarf, never mind the leather gloves that are gripping—

“You can’t fucking _tase_ me,” Martinez challenges, but he’s distracted enough that he loosens his grip. Wade gasps as he’s finally allowed to suck in a full breath. Oh, don’t get him wrong, the air is freezing cold and feels a little like drowning in the Arctic Ocean, but on the plus side, _breathing_. When he finally twists his head around to stare at Bobby, he discovers that Bobby is, in fact, clutching a taser.

You can tell because of the yellow stripes on the side. And also because Martinez, for the first time in this whole wild goose chase, looks pretty freaked out.

“Actually, I can,” Bobby replies. He sounds totally calm, but Wade recognizes the tiny tremor that catches in the very back of his throat. He’s pretty sure Bobby’s not a physical confrontation sort of guy. He also suspects Bobby’s never used a taser before in his life. “There’s this legal doctrine called ‘defense of others.’ In it, you can use a reasonable amount of force to protect another person from force. It’s kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Martinez’s hand loosens a little further. Wade watches as the guy glances toward his phone—still under the car, still theoretically unharmed—and then back to Bobby’s taser. Phone, taser, then phone again, and all while his jaw tightens by a few degrees. “I wasn’t gonna hurt him,” he defends as he finally, miraculously, releases the collar of Wade’s coat. Wade catches himself on his elbows to keep from crashing onto his back and bashing his head on the ground. “I just wanted my phone back, and to stay out of this mess with Allan.”

“But you framed Mister Crane?” Bobby presses. He’s disgustingly professional. Seriously, Wade considers throwing up all over the ground, he’s so _earnest_ about it. Or maybe that’s the adrenaline crash. Hard to tell. 

“I didn’t know he’d get charged with animal stuff,” Martinez answers. Bobby raises the taser a couple degrees, and Martinez’s hands shoot up in the air. “Yeah,” he amends. “Yeah, I framed Allan. Like, you want me to write it down? Because I’ll put it in writing if it means I can just have my phone back and go on my way.”

Bobby’s attention flicks down in Wade’s direction. Wade shrugs. He’d like to use his words like a big boy, but he’s pretty sure his body’s too concerned with his racing heart and churning belly to really let him employ his vocabulary right about now. “Monday, you will come to the Suffolk County Legal Aid office and sign an affidavit,” Bobby informs the guy, and Martinez nods immediately. “If you don’t, Mister Wilson will be filing assault and battery charges.”

“He stole my phone!” Martinez complains. Bobby tilts his head a half-degree to one side, and the guy heaves a sigh. “Fine, fine. Monday. I’ll be there. Fucking lawyers.”

Despite Martinez’s super-insincere promise, Bobby stands his ground until the iPhone’s recovered and the guy’s trudged his way up into the nearest block of apartments. When he finally lowers the taser, Wade can see that his hands are trembling like tiny, leather-covered leaves. 

“I should tase _you_ ,” he threatens, but the heat sounds mostly like relief. Wade laughs a little as Bobby rubs a hand up over his face and into his hair, but it’s the sort of laugh that comes out of your nerves all releasing at once. It’s lucky the _rest_ of him didn’t unclench, too. “Dammit, Wade, don’t _do_ shit like that!”

“In my defense, that was _not_ part of the plan,” Wade responds. He finally climbs to his feet, only to find that his legs are shaking. His palms hurt from where he hit the ground; a quick glance reveals that there’re tiny shards of asphalt imbedded in his skin. He brushes off some of the grit, but knows the rest’ll require a pair of tweezers. Experience is a bitch that way. “Where did you even get a taser, anyway?”

Bobby shrugs. “Hank bought it for me when we were in undergrad. I worked the night shift in the cafeteria, and he worried.”

Wade snorts something that might just be another nervous laugh. He’s really not sure at this point. “Remind me to kiss your husband on the mouth next time I see him,” he says.

“No offense, but no.” Wade feels his mouth tip into some kind of smile, but his whole body still feels shaky and unfamiliar. He curls his hands into fists, shoves his hands in his pockets, and then stands there in the middle of the parking lot, just over the spot where Martinez nearly choked him. Bobby watches him like a hawk. Wade wonders if maybe Hank’s not the only member of the Drake-and-McCoy household who worries too much. 

Finally, Bobby nods to himself like he’s made an official decision and then asks, “Do you have any sense of self-preservation?”

“Funnily enough, the answer to that is _also_ no,” Wade replies with a shrug of his own, and then starts walking back to the car before Bobby can ask him anything else.

 

==

“So, wait, lemme get this straight,” Sam says, leaning his elbows on the table. There’s a beer between his palms, but he’s not drinking it as much as he’s manhandling it while his dark eyes sweep up, down, and around Wade’s face. “The guy was gonna pummel the shit outta you and the only reason you left with your head intact was because your buddy had a taser?”

“Pretty much,” Wade admits.

“Darcy, your boy is broken as _fuck_ and still manages to be awesome!” Sam decides, and claps Wade on the shoulder so hard that Wade actually kind of flinches because of it.

The High Bar on a Friday night always reminds Wade a little bit of those smoky college parties in frat-house basements, ones where bodies packed the room from one wood-paneled wall to the next, creating a bunch of sweaty sophomore sardines armed with red cups. Sure, The High Bar is a little classier than that, and it definitely smells better, but once the trivia announcer’s finished reading off the scores and the sound system’s switched back to the jukebox, it transforms into a dancing, drinking, collegiate dive bar. The beers are cold and cheap, seating is limited and pretty uncomfortable, and there are never enough bartenders to cover all the patrons.

Beside him, smashed into the middle of the booth between Wade and Piotr, Darcy rolls her eyes. “He left out the part where Bobby almost killed him for almost-dying,” she informs Sam. She’s drinking something that’s bright pink and decorated with a tiny umbrella, and this is definitely not her first. No, she’d been nursing her first when Wade’d showed up to trivia ten minutes later than he’d promised to get there, and somewhere around the middle of the game, he’d stopped counting her empties. She spears the cherry that’s sunk to the bottom of her nearly-empty glass with her straw. “And the fact that he only told me after I noticed the scratches.”

“To be fair,” Wade defends, “I fall over all the time.”

“We’ve noticed,” Piotr promises, and Wade collects the condensation off his own beer bottle just to flick water at the guy. 

Everybody laughs, really, except Darcy, who crosses her arms over her chest and focuses on half-morosely sucking the last inch of pink sludge out of her glass. Wade forces a smile but ends up staring at his beer as Kitty, either smart enough to sense the mood in the room or just adorable enough _not_ to, launches into a story about her internship that cracks Sam up from the first sentence. Wade tries to play along, but he keeps nudging Darcy’s knee with his own, trying to coax some emotion out of her.

The glare she sends him could bring a lesser man to his knees. Honestly, Wade’s pretty sure the only reason he’s not on his knees immediately is because there’s a throng of girls dancing all of two feet from his side of the booth.

She then rolls her eyes at him, and Wade sighs as the dark storm cloud descends on their table all over again.

He’s not totally sure what he’s done to deserve this, the weird, too-heavy silent treatment that blankets the space between them and leaves him feeling like his skin’s too small for all his other parts. Actually, no, that’s a pretty huge lie: he knows what he’s done, because Darcy’s informed him in very clear, very short words. She’s mad that he arranged a stakeout with Bobby without warning her, mad that he almost lost his nose to the fury of Luke Martinez’s oversized hands (maybe _that_ is where the nickname originated), and mad that he ignored his cell phone for most of Wednesday night as he laid in bed and recovered from his scare. Because apparently, decent boyfriends inform their girlfriends about their whereabouts and potential peril, or something.

Wade’s not entirely sure about that last part. Most of the conversation about Darcy’s annoyance took place over tersely-worded text messages, and ended in _this is exactly what I’m talking about, Wade. exactly._ Granted, it only ended that way because Wade’d put his phone on silent, dropped it in his desk drawer, and ignored it for all of Thursday, but either way, it’d killed the conversation.

And, apparently, Darcy’s mood.

“So, you finish that project?” someone asks, and Wade jerks his head up from where he’s expertly picking the label off his beer bottle to find that Piotr’s watching him. When he doesn’t respond, Piotr lifts a shoulder. “I thought the reason you weren’t coming on Fridays is because you were working on an important project.”

“Oh, right,” Wade answers, and tries to ignore the way his stomach swims around the second he thinks of Nate’s office and that comfortable chair that, at this point, probably features a permanent Wade-shaped indentation. “I thought it was about time I took a break, so I told Nate we could pick it up next week sometime.”

In an e-mail sent five minutes before the end of the work day, because Wade is nothing if not a huge chicken-livered coward.

“Wait, Nate Summers?” Kitty asks, pausing with her beer halfway to her lips. When he nods, she immediately lowers the glass to the table and lets out a long whistle. “I read a couple of the articles he wrote when he ran the immigration clinic at— What was it? Arkansas, maybe?”

Sam raises his hands. “Don’t look at me, lady. All that social justice stuff, that’s on you. I’m headed straight for the firms, do not pass go.”

Kitty slugs him in the arm, probably more for show than force—though, actually, Sam kind of grunts about it, so maybe not _just_ for show after all—and then shakes her head. “He’s _good_ at what he does.”

“And a douchebag,” Darcy volunteers immediately. Her glass is totally empty, but she gestures in Wade’s direction with it, floppy-armed. Wade figures out pretty quickly that losing count of her glasses was not his best move. “Wade bitches about him all the time. He says weird shit, he goes all cold shoulder— You compared him to that Katy Perry song about a hundred times—”

“He takes a little getting used to,” Wade defends, holding up his hands. Across the table, Kitty stares at him and Darcy like she’s never seen two dating people disagree before. And, by the way, Wade only registers the whole thing as a disagreement because of how Darcy huffs and rolls her eyes. “He’s an acquired taste. Like wine. Or goat cheese empanadas.”

“Oh, _please_ ,” Darcy retorts, completely cutting off Wade’s opportunity to crack a joke about goat cheese and change the subject. “Are you really doing a one-eighty on the guy just because Kitty’s got a social justice brain-boner for him?”

Kitty’s face flares red. “I do _not_!” she squeaks. Unfortunately for her, Piotr’s too-amused smirk tells an entirely different story. At least he hides it behind his beer.

Darcy, meanwhile, fails to miss even half a beat. “You’ve bitched and moaned about him over and over,” she needles, twisting until she meets Wade’s eyes. Her hand-flaps are loose, but her gaze is piercing and unwavering. Whatever she’s drinking hasn’t screwed with her razor-sharp mind. Or at least, not yet. “He doesn’t get your jokes, he goes cold-shoulder when you least expect it, he sits in the dark talking on the phone, he teases you in a way that sounds more to _me_ like mocking . . . ” When she finally closes some of the distance between them, it’s to prod him in the chest. “So stop playing around like you’re secret buddies or something. He’s a dick, you know he’s a dick, the end.”

“I—”

“I need another drink,” Darcy decides before Wade can really respond, and it’s pretty telling that she climbs over Piotr in her quest to escape the booth. The resident Russian plants a big hand on her hip to steady her, though, and helps catch Kitty’s beer when Darcy almost knocks it over. “Anybody else need anything? No? Cool.”

“Hey, actually,” Sam starts to say, but Darcy’s already spun on her heel and strode off toward the crowded bar before the sounds even form all the way into words. He grimaces a little, Kitty frowns, and all three of them—even Piotr, who usually stays out of drama (as far as Wade can tell, at least)—turn to glance in Wade’s direction.

“What,” Sam demands, a _really_ unimpressed look spreading across his face like some kind of muscular wildfire, “did you _do_ to that girl?”

“Nothing,” Wade answers, shaking his head. He feels the three of them still staring him down, but all he’s really capable of doing is sighing. He tips his bottle back and forth between his fingers, the beer weighting it so it teeters on its rounded edge before falling back into his grip. Clint’s better at the trick, but then again, Clint’s better at a lot of things. “I mean, she’s right. I do bitch about Nate. But it’s good-natured bitching, the kind when you’re stuck with a friend who tends to drive you—”

“Not that,” Piotr cuts in. When Wade glances up, it’s just in time to watch the other man roll his lips together into a tight frown. “What I think Sam means is, well . . . Are you and Darcy okay?”

Wade rolls his eyes. “I swear to the cute little baby Jesus, if one more person asks me whether Darcy and I are good, I am going to light them on fire and—”

“That might need to wait,” Kitty says suddenly, and Wade snaps his lips shut because, well, Kitty’s not the interrupting type. Kitty’s the type who’ll let you ramble for seventeen minutes on the current Canadian men’s curling team and why you really miss the halcyon days of Kevin Martin’s early years. She nods in a direction that qualifies as _mostly behind Wade_ , and when Sam scowls at her, elbows him. After a couple seconds of silent conversation, he lets out a low whistle.

“Just when you’d think there’s enough trouble around here,” he intones, flinching back like he’s waiting on a blow. Wade twists around in his seat as he tries to follow the guy’s gaze. The bar’s packed with people, everybody vying for a little attention from the bartenders, but Darcy’s not in the throng. No, instead, Darcy’s hanging back, talking to a tall, scrawny guy in ridiculous jeans and—

“Peter’s always had a great sense of timing,” Kitty says, finally relaxing her neck from where she’d craned it to see around her overly-enormous boyfriend. Her ponytail flops when she shakes her head. “In that his sense of timing’s the worst, of course.”

“Peter?” Wade asks. The guy’s unremarkable, just another brown-haired hipster in a sea of brown-haired hipsters. His glasses probably don’t have real lenses in them. His shoes are definitely knock-off chucks. “Peter who?”

“He’s captain of the Boogie Woogie _Daily Bugle_ Boys, I think.” Piotr notes. All three of them turn to stare at him, and he lifts his ridiculous shoulders into a shrug. “Someone needs to pay attention to the competition.”

“Someone needs a hobby, if you ask me,” Sam retorts, but his eyes immediately hone back in on he who shall henceforth be known as Skinny Peter. 

“Uh, so, it’s great that this guy can blow eight to the bar in boogie rhythm,” Wade says after a couple seconds of awkward, Darcy-centric silence, “but I have no idea who he _actually_ is.”

Kitty and Sam exchange a couple nervous glances before, finally, Kitty sighs and sets down her drink. She spends a couple seconds pushing her hair out of her face. When Wade twists to glance at Darcy again, it’s just in time to catch Skinny Peter smiling at her while her fingers linger on his arm. “Peter Parker,” Kitty explains while Wade watches Darcy play idly with the ends of her hair. “He works at the _Daily Bugle_. I think he’s mostly a photographer, but sometimes handles their online articles? I don’t really know.”

“He’s won a few local art awards for his photography,” Piotr offers. Art people, Wade decides, are _weird_.

“Anyway, he and Darcy, they’re—friends, you could say.” Whether it’s the hesitation in her word choice or in her _voice_ , Wade’s not sure, but either way, Sam snorts at her. By the time Wade twists back around, they’re elbowing each other and muttering things under their breath. He misses most of it, but there’s no mistaking Kitty’s annoyed snap of, “I am not telling him _that_ , Sam.”

“Fine,” Sam returns. He picks up his beer and downs the last couple inches in a handful of greedy swallows. “Darcy and Peter go way back,” he explains after he wipes his mouth and sets his empty glass on the table. “Darcy’s minor was communications, Peter doubled in journalism and mass media, and they had all kinds of classes together.”

“So?” Wade asks, but he knows from the way his face feels that he’s frowning. He twists around in the booth just in time to watch Darcy’s hair tumble back behind her shoulder as she tips up her head and laughs. He can’t remember the last time he and Darcy really laughed together. Even during their weekend of fooling around, nothing really felt _fun_ enough to laugh. It’d mostly felt forced, like Wade stripping off his t-shirt that one night had also stripped a shiny, protective layer off their relationship.

He prefers blaming it on his scars rather than the alternative.

“So?” Sam repeats. There’s a note of disbelief in the back of his voice. “Listen up, my man. Have you ever really wanted to date somebody but neither of you ever ended up single at the same time? Like, every time your relationship splintered, she was hooked up, and every time she was on her own, you were with somebody?”

Wade stands firmly on his knee-jerk reaction and decides the best course of action is to lie through his teeth. “Not really, no.”

“Well, it happens sometimes. And with Darcy and Peter, it happened _every_ time, bar none.” 

There’s a note of finality in Sam’s tone, a sure sign that Wade can now tune him out and focus on the scene over by the bar. Kitty asks about somebody named Gwen, Sam answers, and Wade hears absolutely none of it. All of his senses, every _iota_ of focus in his entire body, it’s all focused on Darcy and Peter. 

On Darcy’s long fingers scratching down the length of Peter’s arm.

At the way Peter laughs at whatever words tumble out of Darcy’s mouth.

At the long, lingering looks between them, ones that’d probably set fire to the rain if the rain happened to be, you know, flammable.

“I need a drink,” Wade says limply, but only after he’s already standing. He weaves his way through the throng of dancing girls (most of whom are probably too young to drink, but hey, fake IDs exist for a reason, right?) and horny twenty-something guys hoping for a one-night stand, but his eyes never leave Darcy and Peter. Darcy’s laughing again, her fingers sliding back up Peter’s arm and then dancing on his shoulder, and—

“Hey,” Wade greets, stepping cleanly into the conversation. Darcy’s grin drops immediately off her face and onto the floor, and her hand jerks away from Peter like someone’s branded her. Peter—who, up close, is actually pretty cute, all boyish charm and potentially-winning smile—frowns, but he looks confused instead of guilty.

Then again, Darcy looks more frustrated than guilty, herself. Frustrated, then _angry_ , because she spits, “I told you I was getting a drink.”

“I needed one too,” Wade replies, holding up his empty beer bottle. He can’t remember picking up his beer bottle, actually, but it’s definitely in his hand. He wiggles it, and the last half-swallow of beer sloshes around. “I thought I’d check in, make sure you were okay. And, you know, stuff.”

“Stuff,” Darcy repeats. Wade feels heat start creeping up the side of his neck, but he swallows around the feeling. When she crosses her arms under her chest, everything lifts and bounces. Peter stares with all the subtlety of a freight train accident while Wade tries to focus on her face.

Her angry, red-cheeked, glaring face.

On second thought, he should’ve just ogled her like Skinny Peter.

“You know, call me psychic, but I’m starting to think maybe I should go, uh, wash my hair or something,” Peter says. He jerks his thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “I’ll text you later, okay?”

“Sure,” Darcy replies, but her eyes never lift from Wade. His heart crawls into his throat, nests there, and beds down to hibernate for the rest of winter; even as Peter slinks away and snags his coat from a table presumably occupied by his friends, Darcy’s glare holds totally steady.

Ever wonder what it feels like to be under the scrutiny of a laser beam? Look no further, Darcy Lewis can supply that very experience for no cost to you.

“Listen,” Wade starts to say, reaching up to rub the back of his neck, “I—”

“No, _you_ listen, you monumental _tool_ ,” Darcy snaps, and the words immediately die on Wade’s lips. He stands there open-mouthed and stupid, catching flies with his tongue still pressed against the back of his teeth. He only really manages to snap his jaw shut when Darcy smacks him hard in the arm. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, and right now, I’m past wanting to know. Because even overlooking the part where I thought we were finally making a little headway in the honesty department—” And Wade can admit, he flinches at that one. “—you try to, what? Rush in like Prince Charming and protect me from the evil warlock Peter? Who, by the way, is one of my oldest friends. Definitely older than _you_ , at least.”

Wade flinches a little, because, well, _ow_. Not because it’s a lie, or that Darcy’s overstating reality as they know it, but because Darcy’s not the kind of person to pull out the intentional jabs. A little wounding here and there, sure. Catching you in the crossfire, absolutely. But an intentional blow to the soft parts?

Yeah.

That actually hurts.

Worse, she’s clearly not done.

“I can fight my own battles,” she informs him, and presses two long fingernails into the middle of his chest. He wonders if she can feel his scars and remember the patterns she’d tried to memorize last Saturday night. “And you know what else? Even if I couldn’t, I am not sure I’d want _you_ fighting them for me. Not right now, and not while you’re still lying.” She tosses her hair. “You know what? You and Nate Summers are a lot alike, because you’re both impossible to read and have no idea how to treat people you’re supposed to care about. You kind of deserve each other.” 

She shoves him, then, the flat of her palm against his chest, and immediately strides away from the bar. Across the room, Kitty springs from her seat at the booth and trails behind Darcy as she storms into the bathroom and slams the door hard; both Sam and Piotr send Wade confused looks, and Wade—

Wade wants to defend himself. He wants to stand on a bar stool and explain in detail why he’s nothing like Nate Summers. He wants to find the words to describe how complicated and stupid his life is, how _confused_ he feels nine tenths of the time, how he’s constantly torn between trying to tread water and just drowning. But just like everything else he wants, all the words hover a few inches beyond his reach.

Instead, he shrugs at the two guys left at the booth, wades through the sea of college students to collect his jacket and apologize for screwing up their night, and escapes into the cold of the February night.

In the parking lot, he stands in the dark and, for the first time, wishes he’d just stuck around at work and spent his night with Nate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The newest MPU posting schedule, which currently represents all chapters to be posted through the end of 2013, can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/63557592323/ai-od-goes-weekly-starting-this-friday-you-are).
> 
> I also wrote a ficlet featuring Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. characters in the MPU. It is called ["The Cardboard Hedgehog."](http://archiveofourown.org/works/999399) It may be relevant to your interests.


	13. The Quiet Things that (Mostly) No One Ever Knows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade handles an old case, a new case, a borrowed case— Well, okay, no. There’s no borrowed case, but Wade most certainly is blue, and none of the significant people in his life are helping with that. Not even you, Clint Barton.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, Allan should probably be attending the plea negotiation meeting with Maria and Wade. But that would’ve made the conversation and ensuing antics more difficult, so I took a bit of a creative license. I’m sure you all mind horribly. 
> 
> Trigger warning for child abuse, which is described in some detail. Not graphic, but more descriptive than “and he abused a child.” 
> 
> My betas’ summaries of this chapter include “aww, Wade” and “I hate Nate.” I keep them around for their amazing commentary. Jen and saranoh, what would I do without you?

“And then, of course, there’s our self-service form repopulation project,” Emma says, and Wade stops doodling in the margin of his legal pad.

He’s not an expert on religious tradition or anything, so if he screws this one up, he’s sorry about it, but here’s a universal truth: staff meetings are hell. Fiery, too-hot, sweat-your-balls-off hell, complete with an actual, real-life demon who wears her blonde hair completely straight and matches white pants with a cropped, equally-white blazer. Wade wonders whether Emma owns anything in a more traditional lawyer color. Black, maybe, or tan. Even gray might be more appropriate than her endless parade of white or slightly off-white pants suits, suit dresses, regular dresses, and capris.

You didn’t know white capris were an actual thing people bought, did you? It’s okay. Wade didn’t either, until he met Emma Frost.

Speaking of Emma Frost, he definitely refrains from looking at her mind-reading face of creepy calm after she’s finished her comment about the forms. Instead, he focuses on the top-most page of his legal pad, the one that features a tiny grease mark from the doughnut he’d scarfed down in an attempt to look like he still enjoys eating. With a little ball-point ingenuity, he’s transformed the grease mark into a pond surrounded by a housing development. Except after the third block of houses, the roads twist and turn into giant snakes, and little stick-figure people scream as they try to run away from certain, snaky doom. Scribbled around various parts of the high-quality tableau—seriously, he should sell this shit somewhere, no joke—are notes from Emma’s usual mind-numbing presentation. There’s the date and time of the ethics CLE she’s registered all five of them for (including Bobby, the king of all things ethical), a list of cases that she’s working on appealing and will therefore be pretty preoccupied with, the names of the couple people she’s interviewing for a part-time position, and the list drags on. Wade cares about exactly zero of these things, of course, but he also cares about not being fired for inattention.

And Emma is literally the last person in the world who’d feel sympathy about his barren field of fucks.

“I’ll admit that my hopes for having everything done on time weren’t high,” Emma continues, and Wade starts pushing the tip of his pen into one of the road-snakes’ eyes. It’s just a cheap Wal-Mart brand blue ball-point, so who really cares if he snaps the point off? Because the way his fist closes tight around it and the way the muscles in his arm twitch when he presses down, yeah. He’s pretty much guaranteed to snap it right in half. “And then, just when they started to look like they were on schedule, I added a second set of forms.”

“And Wade pissed off his girlfriend,” Carol mutters.

Wade’s hand jerks and rips a hole in the paper. It cuts across the housing development, and also? It’s noisy. Seriously, the whole pad slips along with his hand, knocking into his empty coffee mug and tipping it over with an enormous clatter, and then, for good measure, he swears at it. As a reward for his own stupidity—yeah, like you can call it a reward, that’s hilarious—everyone stares at him like he’s just hopped up onto the table and started his own _Magic Mike_ performance. 

Well, okay. Not everyone. Carol, Bobby, and Emma, they all stare at him.

Nate wraps his enormous hands around his own coffee mug and focuses on a random spot in the middle of the table. Not a single one of his oversized muscles twitches.

Wade tries very hard not to grip his pen like it’s a shank. “Sorry,” he mutters, and picks up his cup.

“And just when I’m attempting to pay you a compliment,” Emma complains, complete with a very classy, very long-suffering sigh. She rubs the spot above her left eyebrow, a sure sign that her frustration’s spiking and the next step involves a lot of yelling. Wade, meanwhile, just stares at her. “Because I do have the unexpected privilege of announcing that, this weekend, Nate and Wade uploaded the last few forms, a good two weeks ahead of schedule.”

The words hit Wade like an entire ton of bricks to the face and immediately distract him from everything else in the room. Carol starts cracking jokes about outsourcing and hiring child legal labor from Bangladesh to finish the assignment and Bobby claps Wade on the shoulder, but Wade— Wade clutches his pen like it’s the last thing rooting him to the earth and stares across the table.

Because here’s the thing: Wade spent his weekend alone in his apartment with nothing but some freezer-burned fish sticks and a twelve-pack Sam Adams seasonal sampler to comfort him. He watched a couple seasons of _Sons of Anarchy_ and only left the house for garlic-and-salt potato chips and two five-dollar footlong sandwiches (because man cannot live on fish sticks alone). Wade played a variety of first-person shooters against strangers, ignored two different calls from Clint Barton, stared forlornly at his work files while lying in his bed until noon, and discovered once and for all that the worst feeling in the world consisted of a girl you cared about posting the following Facebook status late Friday night:

_actions speak louder than words. except every time you act, you make me suspect you’re a huge asshole, and every time you speak, you prove it._

In short, Wade’d never once touched the form-coding project over his very long, very lonely weekend. And even if he’d touched it—and, again, he definitely never did—he certainly couldn’t have finished the damn thing.

He stares across the table.

Nate keeps staring at his coffee like he’s trying to read his future in the damn thing.

“I’m not done going through all of them,” Emma continues, flattening her hands to the table. At least, Wade assumes that’s what she’s doing. As much as he wants to pay attention to her and bask in her rare and wonderful compliments, he also wants to watch Nate. The unmovable stone buttresses of his arms and shoulders never twitch. He wonders if the guy’s even alive. “But so far, they’re the type of high quality I’d expect from you two.”

“Or just from Nate,” Carol mutters. The flash of blonde followed immediately by a huffy sigh can only be Emma snapping her head to glare at the other woman. Again, not that Wade knows this for a fact.

If anything, he’s even less sure of the glare, because he’s not breathing and it’s turning the edges of his vision a little splotchy. Bobby elbows him in the ribs and forces him to inhale, which helps. Kind of.

Emma continues on, filling the empty space in the conference room with compliments about _good work_ and _rising to challenges_ —half of which, Wade suspects, is a dig at Carol and the massive VA Hospital case that’s looming in her immediate future—but Wade completely blocks her out. He blocks everything out, really, from Bobby’s concerned stare to the glory of the snake-road tableau on his legal pad, and focuses the entirety of his energy on Nate. It’s the first time he’s really focused on Nate since he’d left The High Bar in embarrassment and disgrace; most of his energy over the weekend went toward hosting a one-person _Darcy hates me now_ pity party. But the longer he watches Nate sip his coffee without lifting his head, the more he feels the last bits of streamers and confetti from the pity party start to clear. 

Darcy hating his guts for mostly-justifiable reasons, that’s one thing. That’s a thing he understands, one he maybe even _deserves_ , and he’s certainly not going to lodge some sort of appeal about it.

But Nate finishing their project without him and completely blanking him? After all the time together, the burritos, the conversations, the day out with Hope?

No, that’s totally another story, and instead of self-pity, it deserves incandescent anger.

He feels the anger starting to twist around in the pit of his stomach, a bolus of frustration that completely replaces his three-day old despair, when Emma finally dismisses the meeting. Wade bolts out of his seat as fast as he can, but Nate’s faster; by the time Wade’s grabbed his legal pad and mug, Nate’s almost all the way out the door. Wade swears under his breath and fumbles for his bent pen before rushing out into the hallway.

“Wade,” Emma calls after him. When he ignores her and starts toward the stair, she repeats his name ten times more sharply. He freezes there, his heels glued to the floor, because he knows moving even a half-centimeter further will incur the full force of her wrath.

He watches Nate disappear up the stairs before he summons the wherewithal to slowly face his boss. She crosses her arms under her breasts, her head tipped to one side, and his stomach ties itself into knots. In that moment, he’s sure she knows that Nate finished the project without him. In fact, he’s sure she knows just about everything that’s transpired in the last couple weeks: the Hope-outing and Nate’s weirdness, his fights with Darcy and their distance, his slightly-questionable stakeout with Bobby and his weekend of laying around in his boxers. He tightens his grip on his legal pad until he’s mostly holding it like a shield.

“Emma?” he attempts, because she keeps watching him.

“I need you in my office,” she informs him crisply. He nods like an idiot and follows her, jogging along at her heels like the well-trained puppy he is. Her office, unlike her wardrobe, is filled with warm colors and snazzy little personal touches; he stares at a sort of Georgia O’Keefe pastel flower painting on the wall and tries to ignore the fact that Emma closes the door behind them. Her bookshelves are crammed with well-worn books on civil rights and employment law, including one with the exciting title _Employment Law Stories_. Well, technically two books with that exciting title, because Emma owns both the first and second editions. He studies their well-worn spines while she moves across to her enormous dark-wood desk and settles into her equally-enormous leather chair.

With the white outfits and the perfect blonde hair, she looks like a high-class stripper. Like, you’d expect her at that classy _Hellfire_ place downtown.

Here, in an office filled with law books and the stacks of case files on the table next to her tiny couch, Wade’s reminded that she’s a seriously scary lawyer.

If this is about the project, he thinks, he can probably explain his way out of it. 

“If this is about the project,” he starts to stay, turning toward her, “I can probably—”

“Why would this be about the project?” she interrupts. For the first time in recorded history, she actually looks surprised. Oh, she covers it well, worrying her pink lips together and quirking a knowing eyebrow, but Wade’s ninety-five percent sure she’s faking it until she makes it. He lets his shoulders loosen a half degree. “I wasn’t blowing smoke in there. You two did good work. What I’ve checked so far seems— Well, I’d rather not call it _perfect_ , it might go to your head.”

Wade wets his lips. “But?” he asks, because he can hear the end of the sentence dangling between them.

“But,” she agrees, nodding, “it’s good work.” She narrows her eyes at him. “Is there something I should know before I dive too far into the folder?”

“No,” Wade answers, entirely too quickly. He sets down his legal pad on the corner of her desk just so he can gesture at her, sweeping her fears under an invisible and apparently floating rug. “No, nothing you should know, I just— I mean, I saw that one time when you freaked out because you thought Bobby half-assed that divorce settlement he wrote super-fast. I didn’t want you to think I was half-assing, you know, important self-service forms that give indigent people access to justice, or whatever.”

Emma purses her lips into a tight, thin line. “To be fair, no one ever told me Bobby took every divorce class offered at the law school.”

“To be fair, no one ever _expected_ Bobby to take all the divorce classes, he’s so into love and marriage and tiny little babies.” Wade only really releases his breath when Emma cracks a tiny, almost imperceptible smile. He likes Emma a lot, most the time—she’s terrifying, sure, but she’s that talented kind of terrifying you’re forced to admire even as you’re wetting yourself in fear—and he really loves his job.

Nine-tenths of his job. The parts involving needy goat-molesting hipsters and asshole android co-workers, he could do without.

“So,” he says after a couple seconds, once Emma’s leaned back in her seat and actually looks a little comfortable, “you needed me in here for something? I mean, unless you just wanted me to look at the artwork or whatever, which I’m more than happy to—”

“I did need you,” Emma admits, and immediately sobers up. Seriously, it’s like a switch is flipped, and before Wade can ask what exactly’s happening, she twists around in her seat to pick up a thin blue file folder. Blue folders are criminal cases that the court assigns to legal aid, usually because the defendant’s such an asshole that he’s pissed off the couple other public defenders in the county. Sure, every once in a while it’s actually that the other attorneys who do public defender work—like ABBA, for instance, though Wade’s pretty sure there’re a couple others besides the fantastic clump of attractive Swedes who don’t technically all work in the same firm (or so Sif keeps claiming)—are conflicted off the case, but most of the time? Defendant’s just an asshole.

Hey, comes with the territory, and all that.

Emma slides the folder in front of him, but when he reaches for it, she flattens her hand against the cardstock. “This came in Friday afternoon,” she says. Her ice blue eyes drift across his face until he allows her to stare right into his soul. He tries his damnedest to stare right back. “I happened to be the one reviewing referrals, and I flagged it.”

“Flagged it?” Wade repeats, staring at her. She nods briefly, and he rolls his eyes. “Okay, what, did some sort of _Wade’s a wilting flower_ e-mail go around to everybody I know? Because in the year and a half I’ve been here, you’ve never flagged a case because you think I’ll, don’t know, be unable to competently and diligently represent my client due to personal reasons or _whatever_ the ethics textbook language is.” He expects Emma to raise an eyebrow or something, but instead, she just keeps staring. He heaves a sigh and then, very quickly, raises his hands. “I’m a big boy. I can handle it.”

“You have no idea what the case is about.”

“I’m representing an alleged goat-fucker right now, Emma. Seriously, how much worse could _this_ be?”

She allows him a one second pause—just enough that she can catch his eyes again and he can set his jaw in what he hopes is stubborn determination and not total annoyance—before answering, “Three counts of felony-level child abuse.”

Wade’s mouth snaps shut.

Emma lifts her hand from the file, then, and Wade reaches out to flip open the file. All that’s included so far is the charging document and the piece of paper proving that Creighton Alexander—what a _name_ —can’t afford to hire his own attorney. Wade usually reads the financial documents, tries to understand what his clients’ lives are like, but instead, he finds himself staring at the list of charges.

Because, apparently, Mr. Alexander inflicted “cruel and inhuman corporal punishment” on a child under the age of eighteen. Specifically, a boy child born at the tail end of 2004, making him—

Wade feels his stomach drop once he’s actually done the math. The victim—alleged victim, whatever—is eight years old.

The same age as Hope Summers.

He flips the folder shut the second the thought pops into his head and immediately shoves it on top of his legal pad. He feels Emma watching him, her face full of that perfect caution only learned by really talented lawyers. He’ll never be a member of that secret society, he knows, but at least he can hide his face by gathering up his things. “I can take a guy who beat up his kid,” he says, and ignores how his voice sits in the back of his throat.

Emma presses her lips together. “I called a friend of mine who’s with child services,” she says, her tone totally neutral. Wade stares at the folder’s slightly-bent corner and the coffee stain on his legal pad’s binding to avoid meeting her eyes. “It sounds like the case involves cigarette burns. I don’t want to—”

“I can handle a guy who hurt his kid, okay?” Wade cuts in. When he finally snaps his face up a couple inches, it’s in time to watch her jaw flex slowly. They’ve never participated in the kind of knock-down drag-outs that she and Carol’ve really perfected over the years—how Carol kept her job after calling Emma a “frigid bitch” is anybody’s bet—but he knows that he’s walking the line, right now. If she snaps at him, he’ll either need to cower like a kicked puppy or stand his ground until she burns the room down around him.

He flinches at the thought. 

“Look,” he presses, because she’s still watching him entirely too closely, “I know I’m not exactly my best self lately or whatever, but I’m good at this. I’m a _good_ attorney. And this—” He waves a hand at the folder. “—is just another case. Okay? Like goat-molesters, vandals, shoplifters and wife-beaters. Just another case.”

She nods. “All right,” she agrees, but insincerely. Like she’s lacing up her armor for a future battle, because she knows this is really just the boarder skirmish. Wade hates the feeling that she knows something he’s still clueless about. “But you know the rules of professional responsibility. If you need to conflict out, I can refer the case to an outside contractor.”

“I won’t conflict out,” he tells her, grabbing his empty coffee mug off the edge of her desk.

“Wade—”

“I _won’t_ ,” he repeats, and immediately walks right out of her office.

He breezes past her assistant and up the stairs, brushing past Carol’s annoying part-timer and heading straight into his office. He dumps the whole mess on his desk—mug, legal pad, folder, cheap-ass ballpoint pen—and then stares at the piles of debris around it. He’s felt overwhelmed at work for the last week or so, swamped by the balancing act of his cases and the project with Nate, and his desk proves exactly that. He sweeps a couple empty water bottles into the trash, then some post-its, and suddenly he’s on a cleaning frenzy, sorting through shit he’s ignored for entirely too long.

He repeats to himself that it’s necessary, that cleaning’s great for the soul (or whatever), but it feels mostly like a distraction. It’s an attempt to escape from himself, to ignore pity-parties and tiny balls of anger that still roll around in his stomach like undigested lumps of bubble gum, but it fails. It fails, and suddenly he’s heaving things at the garbage can instead of calmly dropping them in, slamming folders into plastic trays with enough force that everything on his desk jumps, and opening and closing his file cabinet hard enough that it fucking rattles. It’s like his subconscious thinks that if he cleans hard enough, everything else in his life might just fall back into place.

Darcy won’t call him out on social media like a passive-aggressive preteen.

Nate won’t finish projects without him and then refuse to meet his eyes.

His friends won’t treat him like he’s breakable, Emma won’t stare at him like he’s crazy, men with stupid names won’t use their eight-year-olds as ashtrays, and—

And—

He doesn’t realize he’s left his office until he’s in the hallway, striding across worn carpet like his life depends on it, and he’s totally clueless about his destination until he reaches it. The stupid Comic Sans _do not disturb_ sign rips right off the door and balls up in his hand with the most satisfying crunch, and he throws it down the stairs with a vengeance. Nate’s head snaps up when Wade throws the door open, and for the briefest of seconds, Wade catches some sort of vaguely human emotion flickering across his features.

But only very briefly.

Because then, Nate’s jaw sets into a tight line and his hands lift from the keyboard, and Wade—

Wade tries very hard not to lose his shit. He stands there, two steps past the doorframe, and he tries to just breathe. After all, breathing holds off the black spots at the back of his vision and keeps him from passing out. Breathing engages his mouth, throat, and lungs and staves off the yelling. Breathing reminds him that, if he wants, he can twist around on his heel and walk right out of the room.

At least until Nate nods curly and greets him by saying, “Wilson.”

Then, breathing is completely off the table.

“Oh, fuck you,” Wade sneers, his voice escaping in a sharp, acidic crack. Nate blinks at him, the closest thing to a flinch that Wade’s ever observed, but he’s past the point of caring. No, right now, the field in which he grows his fucks is absolutely desolate, free of even the tiniest buds of giving a damn, and he slams the door behind him to prove it. Except the doorknob to Nate’s office always acts up at the worst time, and instead of closing, the door just cracks against the frame and then swings open again. It hits the wall, rattles, and then stills, leaving Wade and his anger totally exposed.

He really needs to close the door.

But he can’t stop his mouth.

“You’re an entire bag of dicks, you know that?” he demands. His voice crests in an actual, verifiable shout, the kind that fills the office and then tapers into the hallway. Nate holds his face totally calm, not a hint of reaction, and leaves his eyes focused forward. They’re dead eyes, way past the point of robotic, and Wade resists the urge to pick up the nearest object and fling it at him. He kicks the chair, instead, hard enough that it almost tips over; when the sudden act of violence at least coaxes an eyebrow twitch out of the asshole across from him, he kicks it a second time. “After _everything_ , you know? After a year and a half of trying to figure you out, after we finally start getting somewhere and I can kind of see you as a person, and I finally think maybe we’re friends, you— You—” 

He raises his hands like he expects the words to appear in front of him. They don’t, of course, but he wishes they would. He wants to wrap his fingers around them, grip them until they’re physical, malleable things, and then bend them to his will. He wants to explain everything he’s feeling, every ounce of anger and hurt and frustration, but he can’t without help.

Story of his fucking life, right?

“And _then_ ,” he presses, because he knows if he stops, the cold hand of embarrassment will reach up and grip him around the throat, “after all of that, you introduce me to your kid, and we spend the day together, and the parking lot thing—”

Nate scoffs, then, this sudden release of breath that brings all of Wade’s anger to a screeching halt. He even physically steps back a little, away from the abused chair and Nate’s enormous desk, but it’s already too late. Because the rueful almost-smile that touches Nate’s lips is bitter and ugly, the worst of all possible expressions, and it cuts through Wade like the world’s sharpest knife.

“I assure you that whatever you think was happening in the parking lot was not,” Nate says. His voice is a flat line, completely cool, and the rush of Wade’s pulse immediately fills his ears. At least, it starts with his ears, but then it spreads to his whole head and into his jaw, every muscle jumping with the beat of his heart.

Actually, “beat” is the wrong word.

His heart is pounding, jumping with enough force that he feels both sick to his stomach and short of breath.

“What?” he asks. He hardly recognizes the word, it’s so sticky in the back of his throat.

“The parking lot,” Nate repeats. He catches and holds Wade’s eyes, and for the first time ever, Wade can’t see Nate behind the mask. There’re no cracks, no little hints of the man he’s come to appreciate and maybe even, you know, care about. No, this Nate is as cold as metal and twice as empty, and all of Wade’s anger drops right out of his body. “Nothing happened in the parking lot, and nothing was going to happen in the parking lot. You imagined it.”

Wade feels his lips part entirely on their own. They start forming words he’s never said aloud—words he’s never really let himself _think_ , even, words so terrifying and enormous that they’ve threatened to trample him every time they entered his head. He’s stopped them every other time, but not now.

Not when, standing in Nate’s office, he can say, “You were going to kiss me.”

Somehow, Nate’s snort is as snide as it is cruel. “I promise, that was _entirely_ outside the realm of possibility,” he answers simply, and reaches for his keyboard.

Wade’s not sure how long he stands there, glued to the carpet in the middle of Nate’s office and listening to the clatter of his big fingers on his keyboard. He’s listened to that clatter a hundred times, memorized its easy cadence like the best white noise in the world, but suddenly, in the cold light of day, every key stroke sounds like a gunshot. He stares at the man he thought he knew—at the shock of silver hair and the lines around his eyes, at the sharp line of his chin and the purse of his lips—until he starts to wonder if he’s hallucinated every minute of the last month and a half. He grasps at every half-remembered bolt of laughter and every hazy shared secret, and he tries to sort it out.

Because he thinks everything—the chicken nuggets, the burrito, the edible arrangement, the parking lot—actually happened. He thinks every last _second_ of their time together was real.

But the longer he stands and watches Nate ignore him, the longer he suspects otherwise.

It’s only when he’s back in his office, staring at his reflection in his computer screen, that he catches a hint of balled up card-stock out of the corner of his eye. He reaches for it, then flattens it out, and lets the feeling of absolute hopelessness that’s sitting in the pit of his stomach overtake his whole body.

Because the tiny card emblazoned with the edible arrangement logo—the stupid card he’d brought into work after Valentine’s Day, the card he’s kept on his desk even after crumpling it—reads, _I think you’ve earned a perfect day with someone you care about._

Wade stares at it for a long time before he finally convinces himself to throw it in the trash where it belongs.

 

==

 

“An affidavit,” Maria Hill repeats, staring at the three pages laid out in the middle of her desk. They’re carefully lined up in order like perfect paper soldiers, one after another. They’re also typed to the clerk of the court’s ridiculous specifications, signed in blue ink, and notarized. Really, as an affidavit goes, the whole presentation’s sort of a work of art.

But Maria keeps eyeing it like she expects it to grow claws and then strip her skin from her skeleton, which is both kind of weird and definitely gross. Like, someone needs to forbid her from ever watching _Dexter_ if that’s the way she’s going to eye poor, defenseless affidavits.

Her eyes snap up across her desk to Wade, and he raises his hands. “An affidavit,” he promises, in case she’s momentarily lost the ability to read the document caption and it’s neatly-printed _Affidavit of Lucas P. Martinez_. “Signed, sealed, delivered, and copied in triplicate in case you want me to officially file it with the clerk.”

“And you expect me to believe that there’s a random stoner out there who can completely exculpate your client?” she asks, quirking a dark eyebrow.

“Not totally,” Wade admits. He starts to shrug, realizes that shrugging risks letting Maria smell exactly how long he’s gone without a shower, and sort of just jerks his head around, instead. “I mostly think that you’ll read this, realize that the alternative involves actually prosecuting a goat-sex case to a jury of twelve uptight citizens, and cut us a moderately reasonable deal.”

Maria purses her lip into a thin, tight line of measured pinkness and then returns her attention to the papers on her desk. It’s probably the most precisely-typed affidavit Wade’s ever helped assemble, perfectly-aligned margins and all. He’s proud of that affidavit, if only because it’ll keep him from staring an opening statement with the words _Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Allan Crane did not violate a goat._

Also, Wade’s present list of things to be proud of really only contains the following:

1\. Knows what day of the week it is (Wednesday)  
2\. Found clean socks in the disaster area that is his apartment (because although he’ll wear the same shirt four days in a row, socks and underwear are totally sacrosanct)  
3\. Decided for the second day in a row that climbing out of bed wasn’t totally a useless endeavor.

Needless to say, it needs all the help it can get.

Wade knows, deep down in some dark part of him that’s probably where his cancer spawned—after all, it popped out of _somewhere_ and he’s not yet convinced that there’s no pit of suck concealed behind his liver—that reasonable adults are supposed to react to shitty life events with a certain amount of grace and dignity. Those adults still eat three meals a day, sleep at night, shower in the morning, and manage to iron their really rumpled dress slacks before meeting with terrifying she-prosecutors. And even if they don’t—even if they skip a meal, a shave, or a fight with the off-brand iron they bought at Goodwill while still in undergrad—they at least fake it pretty well. They don’t lie in bed and stare at their phone for hours on end or sign off Gmail chat because they’re afraid certain women in their lives will find and yell at them. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and keep going.

He, on the other hand, is still hiding under the bed, covered in dust bunnies, dryer lint, and misery.

Mostly that least one, if he’s honest.

He’s picking at a hangnail when Maria finally sighs and glances up from the affidavit. She’s frowning, but not in the sort of way you’d expect if her response was about to be _this is bullshit and you know it_. No, from the way her brow bunches and how she leans back in her chair, Wade mostly expects her to ask what kind of deal he’s expecting.

“What kind of deal are you expecting, exactly?” she asks, folding her hands over her middle.

“I’m glad you asked,” Wade replies. “Half because I practice law like reverse Russian roulette, where there’s only one bullet in the chamber at any time but you _want_ it to go off, and half because I seriously spent an hour and a half on the phone with Allan last night, trying to talk some sense into him.” He waves off that last part with a floppy-fingered hand, and Maria narrows her eyes. Oh, right, the rambling. He wonders if rubbing his face chases any of the exhaustion from his face and voice. “I think—and obviously, we’ll need to bring my client in here, but I want to spell it out for you so you can mull it over—he’ll plead to the pot and the exposing himself if you drop the goat.”

She rolls her lips together again. He’s honestly not sure whether she’s _really_ thinking about it or just bluffing. After all, this woman’s one of the Chief Assistant District Attorneys, forged of stone and steel, capable of bringing men to their knees, and—

“Just the goat,” she asks without employing a question mark.

He nods. “Just the goat. It’s the only felony, which means it’s the only one that’ll mess with his lucrative future of, I don’t know, teaching beginning interpretive dance at the community center.” Maria snorts at him, and he almost cracks a smile. The expression twitches on his face, unfamiliar. That’s just the sort of week he’s having. “He’s a screw-up kid, not a sex offender.”

“And you’re not?” 

“Which one? Because, look, what happened in Vegas was supposed to _stay_ in Vegas, and—”

Wade is entirely, one-hundred percent certain he’s never seen Maria Hill smile in an unironic, open sort of way. At least, until right now. “A screw-up kid,” she interrupts, and he’s grateful that he’s not stuck creating some crazy Vegas story for her amusement. Though, then again, his mouth turning to sandpaper’s not a whole lot better. “You’re, what, twenty-seven? There’s still time for you to go goat-streaking, yourself.”

Intellectually, he knows Maria’s joking. Really. She’s smiling and everything, proof that she’s a pod person and will later assimilate him into her Borg-like existence.

But his lizard brain thinks of Darcy and Nate, of kisses and near-kisses in parking lots, of shouting matches and that hollow feeling in softest part of his stomach.

He wets his lips. “I prefer my sloppily-sown oats to stick as close to home as possible,” he answers, and Maria chuckles as she reaches for a legal pad.

They spend another twenty minutes hashing out the details of Allan’s possible plea agreement. Maria’s preternaturally good at predicting what sentences the judges’ll dole out and Wade knows the sentencing grid better than the back of his hand, which turns the whole thing into this comfortable, almost companionable discussion. Without all the nervousness piled onto his shoulders like the worst possible pack mule cargo, Wade’s brain drops some of the amateur dramatics and allows him to actually _focus_. He forgets about angry friends, about fights at trivia, and even about the fucking legal aid parking lot; the haze of disgusting, unacceptable sadness parts and he can finally just be a human person again.

At least, until Maria hits print on the proposed plea agreement that Wade’ll fight with Allan about—because he swears sometimes that the guy is contrary just for the sake of contrariness, which might work in the hipster community but not in the _not going to jail_ community. Because as the printer’s groaning through two pages of notes, she swivels in her chair, looks Wade in the eye, and asks, “Is everything okay with you?”

Wade almost chokes on air. Actually, no, correction: Wade totally chokes on air. He hacks for a second, Maria staring him down like he’s a circus performer there for her personal amusement, and then finally nods his head. It’s hard enough to rattle his teeth. “I’m totally okay,” he lies through his teeth. “Right as rain. Another of those sayings I don’t understand, by the way, because I’m pretty sure acid rain won’t ever qualify as r—”

“If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to,” Maria cuts in, holding up a hand. Her nails are a very pretty shade of dark blue. Wade promptly decides to memorize that color rather than risking eye contact. “We’re not friends. Technically, we’re not even acquaintances. And even if we were, I’m not really the person people rush to confide in.” She shrugs slightly, the barest lift of her shoulders under her white shirt, and then turns to pull the papers off the printer. “I just know I always wanted someone to ask when I was going through my divorce.”

He counts himself lucky that she’s looking away when his jaw drops open. He forces it shut before she swivels back his way, then carefully clears his throat. “I’m not married,” he says, mostly because he’s without a better answer.

Maria’s eyes narrow. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“And you know my only modes are incompetent, rambly, and awkward, so you’re going to have to take what you can get,” he shoots back, and he swears that she bites down on a smile before handing over the proposed agreement. 

The district attorney’s office as a whole is pretty quiet when Wade finally steps out of Maria’s spacious “chief assistant” office and into the hallway. He’s about to glance over his shoulder and comment on it, too, maybe present a theory about how the whole sixth floor’s been replaced with pod people, when a voice cuts through the relative silence and immediately turns his blood to ice.

“I’m just saying, Jane, there’s _no_ harm in eating junk food on the couch all day, and if I could get away with it—”

Darcy pulls a face as she steps around the corner, a huge stack of files in her arms and her cell phone nuzzled between her face and ear. She’s flipping through a packet of papers, her dark eyes cast down on the print in front of her even as she rolls them. “Seriously, you have guilt about eating Thor’s beef jerky?” she demands, stopping in the middle of the hall. “Because I remember my birthday cake. Oh, stop making excuses for him, he knows he ate half of it and it’s too late now to fix it.”

For a brief, almost imperceptible second, she scowls down at whatever she’s reading, but then Jane replies with something funny enough to send her into guffaws. Her chin starts to lift, her long lashes fluttering as she raises her face, and Wade—

Remember that whole thing about how he’s not really fitting into the “reasonable adult” category lately? Yeah.

Wade pivots on his heel and darts around the nearest corner like he’s avoiding a pack of wild dogs.

Pepper Potts jerks her face up from her computer screen as he materializes in front of her cubicle in a way vaguely reminiscent of a poorly-dressed ninja. Wade’s pretty sure he scared her, actually, what with her hand on her chest and the surprise etched on her soft features, but there’s really no time to explain. No, he can hear Darcy’s voice carrying, the bugle-blast of a fox hunter as the beagles race through the field.

They are beagles, right?

Springer spaniels?

Well, whatever. Point is: dog metaphor with him starring as the fox. “Sorry,” he mutters, and immediately half-walks, half-jogs in the direction of the bathrooms. Because, like all mature adults, he’s developed a plan to avoid embarrassment and potential yelling, and that plan involves locking himself in the men’s bathroom.

Okay, parts of that might not fit in with the whole “mature adult” thing. But come on. He’s spitballing and running on about three hours of sleep. You come up with a better escape route.

He zigs and zags through the slightly-open common area that features Pepper and Peggy’s cubicles, some of the file clerks’ desks, and also a very confused-looking Steve Rogers who literally stops his conversation with an intern to stare. Wade salutes at him, remembers that, despite the yellow ribbon magnet on the family’s sensible car, Rogers himself never actually served in the armed forces, and reverse-salutes as penance for his mistake. Rogers’s whole face pinches then, and Wade decides reverse-saluting might not be a thing.

“Hold on, Jane, Peggy’s waving me down,” he hears Darcy say, and he practically belly-crawls around Jane’s empty cubicle on his way toward sweet, sweet freedom.

He counts down the steps between him and the hallway that’ll lead him to the bathrooms and then, once danger’s passed, back out to the front of the office. Behind him, Darcy’s voice continues to carry, strong and fearless as always. It sneaks into his ears, down through his chest, and somehow transforms to guilt before it curls its tendrils around his stomach. Darcy deserves better than an unshowered, unshaven asshole literally and figuratively dodging her in a sea of cubicles and mostly-closed offices. Aside from a passive-aggressive Facebook status and shouting at him in public, she’s really pretty innocent in this whole mess. And anyway, even if her innocence were a murkier, shadier thing, common decency is usually non-negotiable.

Wade promises himself he’ll consider these things much more seriously once he’s out of the district attorney’s office, and then, he rounds the corner that promises his liberation.

Rounds the corner and freezes, because standing in the middle of the hallway are Nick Fury and Phil Coulson.

_Standing_ , though, is actually the wrong word. Standing implies a sort of inactivity, a less-creative form of _milling about_ or _killing time_. Nick Fury and Phil Coulson are actually arguing in the hallway, their hands jerking around in staccato gestures and their voices grumbling with a terrifying intensity. Wade’s started to warm to Phil Coulson the person—hey, don’t look at him like that, it’s just hard to hate a guy with the complete collection of _Walking Dead_ trade paperbacks—but Chief Assistant District Attorney Coulson still sends shivers of fear rushing up his spine. 

He really counts himself lucky that neither man notices him as he ducks back around the corner and presses himself against the gray-painted wall.

But he counts himself about three thousand times _less_ lucky that Darcy’s now at her desk, typing furiously.

Thanks to the way the cubicles are all set up, she’s facing almost entirely away from him, allowing him to glimpse only the ridiculous sparkly clip that’s holding up her curls. Over the top of the carpeted divider walls, he notices nothing but bustling file clerks and closed office doors. In fact, the only door that’s not barricaded like Fort Knox is the one just in the periphery of Darcy’s vision.

Wade twists to glance back down the hallway just as Fury’s announces, “That’s a stupid-ass idea, and you know it!” Needless to say, he flinches, flattens himself back against the wall like the world’s most inept chameleon, and stares down into that open door.

Clint nearly falls right out of his pillow nest and onto the floor when Wade bursts into his office and, without warning, slams the door behind him. The flimsy wood rattles in the jamb; Clint’s desk chair teeters as he sticks out a foot to maintain his balance and kicks it. “Dammit, Wade, what is wrong with you?” 

“Please tell me you don’t want an itemized list, because that’d take way too long,” Wade answers, but he’s pretty distracted. Not by Darcy or anything, but by the office doorknob. He gropes it a few times, scowls, and then glances over at Clint. “Does this thing have a lock?”

Clint, proving once again that he’s a talented attorney worth his salary, picks up his _grab life by the thighs_ pillow and sets it back on the ledge. Even without the benefit of eye contact, Wade knows for a fact that the guy’s employing his best _I will light you on fire and roast s’mores over your corpse_ expression.

Par for the course in their friendship, really.

“I’ll take your silence as a ‘no,’” Wade says when the quiet starts crawling up his spine and leaving him itchy. He grabs one of the shitty Goodwill chairs from in front of Clint’s desk and jams it under the doorknob so that the door really can’t be opened from the outside. Or, rather, it _can_ be opened from the outside, but with a lot of elbow grease.

Wade hopes Thor’s in court right about now.

“What are you doing?” Clint demands, and Wade twists around to find his buddy standing behind his desk, hands on his hips. The fire-lighting expression shifts into something tighter and more clinical, and Wade’s left no choice but to groan.

“Please don’t use your bullshit-detector face on me right now,” he begs. He considers dropping to his knees, but instead settles with pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “This is the shittiest of shitty weeks—like, award-winningly bad, you have literally no idea—and the last thing I need is you sniffing out all my issues like a weirdly handsome bloodhound dog.”

Yeah, like that’d ever work against Clint Barton, the most perceptive man in the universe. Seriously, Wade’s pretty sure he owns one of those wrestling belts with those very words etched into it. Probably wears it to bed with Coulson and everything. When Wade stops assaulting his eyes, Mr. Perceptive stares him down. “So, what you’re telling me is that you’re avoiding Darcy.”

“No,” Wade retorts with a wrinkled nose. “What I’m saying is that I don’t want to talk about why I’m here, and also, that you’re the worst friend ever.” Clint sort of tips his head to one side like a curious bird, and Wade heaves a sigh. “Okay, yes, I am maybe avoiding Darcy a little,” he admits, and throws himself into Clint’s other chair. It creaks under his weight and smells vaguely of cigarette smoke. Apparently, nobody ever warned Clint about the dangers of buying fabric-covered furniture second-hand. Also, the stupid thing’s too well-padded to hurt when Wade leans his head back. And just when he could use some lingering pain.

Clint keeps watching him, but the sharp line of his shoulders loosens slightly.

“Things are rough right now, okay?” he explains, because Clint’s stare feels like a Truth Lasso and Wade’s not strong enough to rip the ropes apart and climb to freedom. “It’s just— Nothing’s really all that great, right now, and since there is apparently no rest for even the mildly wicked, I need to hide.”

“I’m pretty sure most people don’t hide from their significant others,” Clint points out after allowing Wade one moment of silent sympathy.

“I’m pretty sure you’re a big black pot right now, badass pen not-new guy,” he shoots right back, and Clint laughs.

Wade braces himself for the argument that follows—because a Clint Barton friendship is one part exercise, one part needling, and three parts useless bickering about things that don’t actually matter—but nothing happens. Oh, sure, Clint stares at him for a couple more seconds, and he worries his lips together like he’s tempted to jump into an ugly-ass conversation, but then he shakes his head. And not at Wade, either, just at himself.

“If Phil comes to the door, I’m letting him in,” he warns as he settles back into the ass-shaped divot in the pillow pile. He swings his legs up onto the ledge, wriggles himself into comfort, and cracks open his case file. 

Wade lets one corner of his mouth kick up into the start of a smile. At least, he assumes it’s a smile. He’s not experienced one of those in a couple days. It feels very strange. “Whatever happened to bros before hos?” 

“My boyfriend’s tongue happened,” Clint returns, and Wade knows for a fact he’s smiling when it devolves into actual laughter. He watches the other guy uncap his highlighter and dive back into work, his brow furrowing as he reads over what looks to be a police report. Wade leaves him to it, because hey, who’s he to argue with the milk of human kindness?

He’s on his third Candy Crush life of the afternoon when he thinks to say, “Thanks.” It’s not really directed at anyone in particular, but there’s only the two of them in the room. Process of elimination, and all that.

Clint shrugs. His shirt’s this really pale purple color— _barely_ purple, you know?—but his tie’s shiny black and catches in the sunlight that slides in through the window. “You were a pretty good friend to me when I didn’t want to talk about my train wreck of a life,” he says. He looks out the window, but Wade’s pretty sure he’s just using the glass as a mirror, a way to look over without risking eye contact. “Might as well return the favor.”

Wade ducks his head for a second and stares at the stupid little rainbow-colored candies on his screen. “Yeah, well, just be glad I’m not in a better mood,” he replies after a couple seconds. “I’d pull out the full Sally Ride Oscar speech.”

Across the office, Clint snorts and shakes his head. “I don’t like you _that_ much, Wade.”

“Yeah, you do,” Wade returns, and instead of arguing, Clint just smiles.

 

==

 

“I just wanna get this case thrown out and move on with my goddamn life,” Creighton Alexander comments, and Wade flinches when his jaw twitches painfully. 

It’s Friday at five-thirty p.m., a time when all good little defense attorneys should be at home on their couch with a beer in one hand and the television remote in the other. Wade’s waited impatiently all week, his traitorous brain counting down the hours while he tried to focus on work. And really, that’s all he’s spent the last two days doing, piling his desk with cases and then leafing through them, one by one, reminding himself of every witness, issue, sub-issue, and defense.

Every time he’s finished a pile, he’s opened another drawer in his file cabinet and started a new one. He’s into cases where his client’s on probation, now, because terms of probation _matter_.

Also, terms of probation present themselves in neat little lists he can memorize and re-memorize as he tries to fill his hours with something other than regret.

He drags his hand through his hair and watches as Creighton Alexander’s twitchy fingers dance across the arm of his chair. He’d called at four-thirty—a half-hour after his scheduled appointment, but whatever—and claimed car trouble, so Wade’d settled down with his dog-eared cases to wait for the guy. Witnesses lists, police affidavits, and scribbled chicken-scratch case notes flooded his vision as Alexander’s promised five-minute delay turned into fifteen, then twenty, then—

“Please tell me you’re not spending your weekend here,” a voice’d interrupted as he finished skimming over a year-old charging document, and he’d jerked his head up to see Carol leaning against his doorjamb. Her usual wide-legged dress slacks and professional blouse had replaced itself with skinny jeans and this amazing flowy top with silver thread running through it, and he’d blinked at her. Blinked and stared, like the ten-year-old who saw his teacher outside of school for the first time, and when his mouth’d popped open, she’d actually rolled her eyes. “What?”

“You sound a lot like this woman I know but _look_ like a back-up dancer in a music video, and I’m just sort of confused . . . ” Wade’d grinned as Carol raised her middle fingers in what he suspected was not an Air Force sanctioned salute, but it didn’t last. No smiles lasted lately, not even the one he’d managed when, earlier that afternoon, Nate’d greeted him by first name in the copy room. Oh, there’d still been absolutely no eye contact, and the robot-man’d gathered up his appellate briefs and ducked back into the hallway at light speed, but for one tiny second, life’d felt normal again.

Wade’d carried around the warmth of Nate’s voice for at least an hour before realizing that feeling that much joy at his fucking name was a little, well, crazy.

The smile’d died a quick and painless death, after that.

He’d realized after a few long seconds that Carol was talking, her hands dancing in the air in front of her, so he’d jerked himself out of his pit of pity (patent pending) to pay attention to her. “—won’t admit she’s thirty-two, sure, but it’s an excuse to drink things with umbrellas in them and dance for a couple hours,” she’d finished, shrugging her slender shoulders. Wade’d wished that he’d tuned back in a few second earlier. “You can come if you want, you know. Bobby and Hank are planning on making an appearance. Hell, even Nate asked for directions to the bar.”

Never before in the history of mankind had a stomach turned to stone as fast as Wade’s did. It’d taken four tries to wet his parched lips. “Nate?” he’d croaked. He’d sounded like a frog who smoked two packs a day.

Carol, though, hadn’t seemed notice, shrugging as she’d rested her weight back against the doorjamb. “He and Jess’ve met a couple times. I figured, hey, the more, the merrier. And frankly, if he’s going to come out, the least you can do is climb out of your funk and join the rest of us.”

He’d scowled. “I’m not in a funk.”

She’d rolled her eyes. “Wilson, you are pretty much _submerged_ in funk. I’m surprised you haven’t drowned in it, yet.”

Her phone’d chimed after that, though, leaving her to trot off to whatever bar encouraged the drunken dancing of thirty-something-year-old lawyers, and Wade’d ended up staring at the folder in front him. He’d tried to imagine Nate—humorless, emotionless, and generally awful—out on a dance floor, an amber drink in one hand while the other cupped the hip of some skinny, attractive woman. Except slowly, he’d started imagining that hand on _his_ hip, the hot rush of Nate’s breath against the back of his neck, and—

Well.

Good thing Creighton Alexander’d shown up when he did. Otherwise, Wade might’ve slunk off to the men’s room to spend some quality time with the awful, itchy paper towel.

Alexander taps a nonsense pattern on the arm of his chair, a shittier, less tuneful version of the “Cups” song from that Anna Kendrick movie, and Wade tries to summon up the patience to like the guy. He’s a tall, scrawny man, a sort of human daddy long legs, and he wears cowboy boots instead of proper shoes. The longer Wade watches him, the more he twitches and shifts all over the place. It’s not a drug-addled twitching—no, Wade knows how to spot those at twenty paces—or the nervous tics of someone desperate for his next drink. Instead, Alexander fidgets around like a guy who wants this meeting to end immediately. Ideally, with a bolt of good news about how easily he’ll win his child abuse case.

Wade scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s not that easy to convince the district attorney’s office to throw out a case,” he explains, the same way he’s explained it to literally every impatient client who’s swooped into his office. He sits forward a little, like maybe straightening his spine’ll accurately express the seriousness of the situation. Just in case, you know, the three counts of felony child abuse seemed like a funny prank or something. “Their charging attorney’s, like, probably one of the most cautious people I’ve ever met, and he’ll hold off for weeks if he thinks that there’s not enough to follow a case all the way to the end. Top it off with the fact that your kid’s involved, and—”

Alexander releases the most derisive sound Wade’s ever heard, a noise that’s like the lovechild of a snort, a hiss, and a sigh. He tosses his head, too, and follows it up with a frankly massive eye-roll. “You mean that curly-haired douchebag who took my kid away’s in on this bullshit?” he asks. Wade grinds his teeth into something he hopes looks like a tight smile instead of a full-blown grimace. “‘Cause I’m working with that queer little shit social worker they sent out to the house. Donny’ll come home no matter what that asshole lawyer says.”

“That’s not really what I meant,” Wade replies. He holds up his hands in surrender. “I don’t have any control over what happens in the child welfare case. I mean, really, your criminal case and that case, they’re totally separate things. That’s why you don’t have the same attorney for both, it’s why they’re handled by different prosecutors, the whole works. But it’s another dynamic we need to look at, because their office is going to get information from two different worlds, and—”

“You don’t have children, do you?”

He asks it out of nowhere, a bolt from the blue that Wade’s not expecting, and Wade feels his fingers tighten around his pen. He’s not sure what’s different about Alexander’s voice—it’s still full to brimming with what Wade assumes is frustration—but it sets every one of his nerves on edge. 

Too bad he’s, like, ninety-nine percent sure that punching clients in the face violates the rules of professional responsibility. Also, too bad he’s even _more_ sure that, if he punched this guy, Emma’d fire him so fast that his head’d spin around like the little possessed girl in that “old priest, young priest, red priest, blue priest” movie.

Alexander narrows his eyes like he’s trying to peer under Wade’s skin, so Wade forces a tiny, tight smile. “Kind of waiting on that, right now,” he answers. Except he’s lying, because he’s pretty sure he’s less _waiting_ and more _doomed to never have any kids, period, amen._ Not for the first time, he thinks about what a shitty father he’d be.

Across from him, his client nods, his icepick chin bobbing slightly. Wade remembers that nod from his childhood, curt and matter-of-fact. The calm before the storm, he thinks, and he feels his stomach flip over. But Alexander stays quiet, his eyes drifting past Wade’s shoulder and out the window. When he turns his face a little, Wade can see how craggy and worn it is, like you’d expect from the side of a really old mountain—except all the intake forms suggest that Alexander’s only around thirty-five, instead of ancient. Life’s been pretty bad to him in those thirty-five years, then, because he looks rough as sandpaper and cold as ice.

Wade scratches the side of his neck. He can feel the rising tide of something truly unpleasant, and he hates every second of it.

Especially since, after nodding, Alexander asks, “You ever had a puppy?”

“Sure,” Wade answers with a shrug. He’s lying, of course, because his mom was allergic and his dad hated anything capable of unconditional love. The closest he’s ever had to a puppy was a goldfish he won at the middle school fun fair. “When I was a kid, but yeah.”

“Then you know what kids are like,” Alexander replies, and Wade’s attempt to fake any sort of sympathetic smile falls flatter than the state of Nebraska. “You bring home this little bundle of something, you think it’s gonna be all cute and cuddly—everything you ever dreamed it’d be—but then it proves to have a mind of its goddamned own.” He leans back in his chair and crosses one leg over his knee. There’s dirt on the underside of his cowboy boot. Dried mud, Wade thinks, and then he stares at it until, as far as his vision’s concerned, it’s the only thing in the whole fucking office. “It pisses on the carpet, it chews up your shoes, and you’ve gotta discipline it. The old rolled-up newspaper, am I right?”

Creighton Alexander’s smile reminds Wade of a viper, jagged and completely untrustworthy. Wade feels his arm shake, he’s gripping his pen so hard. “Right,” he forces out, aware that it sounds more like a grunt than an actual word.

“Right,” Alexander repeats. He leans back in the chair far enough that the legs start to tip up off the floor. Wade considers knocking him over. After all, helping the guy fall’s pretty minor. He might sneak off with a private reprimand from the disciplinary committee and Emma suspending him for a couple days. He could live with that. “Between you and me,” Alexander continues, and Wade pulls himself out of his ass-over-teakettle fantasy, “this country’s gone soft. What’s the world coming to when I can’t discipline my kid? What am I supposed to do, use ‘naughty chairs’ and all that granola bullshit? That stuff’s for pussies.”

Wade tries to respond, he _really_ does, but every sound that might come out end up strangled in the back of his throat. Luckily, he thinks, because he’s starting to lose all semblance of self-control. Were it not for his throat blocking all his words, he might blurt out something he regrets.

And were it not for the pen in his hand, he might actually reach across his desk and strangle his client where he sits. Hey, he watches a lot of CSI. He could make it look like a really unfortunate accident that just happens to involve Wade’s Batman tie fashioned into a makeshift garrote. 

“This whole criminal case’s one big load of horseshit,” Alexander insists. Wade’s fingers ache, but he grips the pen tighter, anyway. “All I did was exercise my right to discipline that little shit and teach him how to act like a man.” He shakes his head. “You have a kid someday, you’ll know what I mean.”

In Wade’s hand, the pen starts to shake. Wait, no, that’s not the pen, that’s his hand. His hand, then his whole arm, and _wow_. Is this what having a seizure feels like? Because his muscles are trembling in a way he’s not used to, and for the first time in his adult life—at least, his adult life off the lacrosse field, ‘cause he used to get pretty fucking riled up during games and whatever—he really wants to dive across the desk and shove his pen into the space right below Alexander’s Adam’s apple.

Client, he tells himself. He transforms it into a religious mantra. Client, client, can’t murder a client, you need to keep your job.

Alexander’s watching him again, though, so he forces a smile. It hurts every muscle in his face and most the muscles in his chest, too. “Well, uh, let’s see what we can do about this whole thing, then,” he says, but what he really wants to say is _you’re a fucker and I hope you die_.

He repeats that phrase in the back of his mind a thousand times as he and Alexander finish the meeting, and then—once he’s watching the guy’s tail lights in the parking lot—he repeats it to the window, too. Over and over again, first muttering and then, eventually, in a normal tone of voice. Or, rather, what he _thinks_ is a normal voice.

When somebody in the doorway asks, “Who are we wishing death on, tonight?”, he realizes he’s been screaming it at nearly the top of his lungs.

He whips around to find Emma standing in the hallway just outside his office, her white get-up hidden by a brown houndstooth coat and soft leather gloves hiding her terrifying fingernails. There’s no hint of the usual, impersonal coldness etched onto her features; in fact, for the first time in the nearly two years he’s worked for Suffolk County Legal Aid, Emma Frost looks just like any other woman in the world. Her pale lips are pursed, her smooth hair pulled back in a ponytail, and without her smart white jacket and high-collared white shirt, she looks approachable.

Normal, Wade thinks.

More normal than him, at any rate.

He drags his hand over his face and then through his hair. He tries to buy time with it, to play up a week’s worth of exhaustion as a preface to his apology, but Emma’s expression never shifts. She watches him the way he’d expect an old friend to watch him, sizing him up without dressing him down, and he suddenly feels empty. Not just tired or sad, but like there’s literally nothing left in his entire body.

“Sorry,” he tells her, and he’s shocked to discover that he means it. He slumps against the window. He expects the shock of cold glass against his back to wake him up, but instead, it settles into the hollow places and stays there. “My new client, he’s kind of a jackass, I just—”

“I can refer the case,” she says simply. Wade snaps his head up, staring at her across the office, and she raises her hands. “No judgment. I told you that you could conflict out, and I mean it.”

He shakes his head hard enough his teeth rattle, but he can’t help it. The last thing he needs is Emma breathing down his neck and triple-flagging his cases every time the subject matter turns a little ugly. His job’s the last intact part of him, the last warm spot in his empty belly. He _needs_ it that way. “I can handle the case. He’s a jerk and I’m overtired, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“Maybe,” Emma replies, her pale eyes like laser beams boring into his soul, “but until your head’s on straight, I don’t think you should be dealing with that particular client.”

“My head isn’t—”

“Wade.” In her mouth, his name sounds like a stop sign looks: strong, red, and final. He drops his eyes to the worn beige carpeting, afraid to meet her too-steady eyes. In all the insanity of the last few weeks—enjoying Darcy’s company, enjoying Nate’s company, fighting with Darcy, fighting with Nate—he’s never stopped to wonder what his ever-observant boss saw in him.

Now, he knows.

“I’ve known you long enough to know the . . . degrees, I suppose you could say, of Wade Wilson,” Emma continues. The single glance he steals in her direction reveals that she’s shoved her hands in her pockets. Passive, he thinks, and then stares at the floor again. “I know when you’re not yourself. I just hope you find _that_ Wade Wilson again sometime soon.”

“What makes you think he even exists?” Wade asks. His mouth sort of formulates the words without his permission, but then they’re out there, floating in the space between he and his too-pretty, too-scary boss. When he finally meets her eyes, he thinks there might be surprise trapped in her expression. Well, surprise and worry. He’s not sure when he figured out how Emma Frost wears worry, but he recognizes it as soon as he sees it. Not that it stops him, or anything. “What makes you think that the old Wade you knew up until, like, three weeks ago isn’t a fake, and what you see now is what you get?”

He expects the silence to stretch between them like taffy, but it only lasts a few seconds. Because then, Emma shrugs her thin shoulders and shakes her head. “Maybe he is,” she answers, “but I’d prefer it if the ‘old Wade’ was the real one.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because,” she replies, “I’m actually pretty fond of him.”

She walks away after that, her footfalls echoing up the stairs, but Wade stands rooted to his place in his office. Frozen there, his back against the window and his eyes trained out into the empty hallway, he tries to sort out the broken pieces of the last few weeks, but he can’t. It’s like someone’s reduced his life to three or four different jigsaw puzzles and then dumped them all into one giant box: every time he extracts a piece that makes some sort of sense, it’s followed by two or three pieces that absolutely don’t match.

Kissing Darcy for the first time in the parking lot, then avoiding her for days until they sorted it all out.

Queso in a bar, Mike the waiter at Chili’s.

Deep talks on Wade’s lumpy sofa, Darcy’s fingers on his lumpy skin, Nate grinning at him despite all his lumps.

A little girl who plays dirty at Hangman, trivia with friends, and two roads diverging in a yellow wood.

He follows all the pieces to their natural conclusion like Hansel and Gretel followed pebbles back home. They drive him into his car and then direct him down darkened early-March streets, steer him through intersections and stop lights, and lead him to a quiet apartment complex halfway across town. The place mostly caters to graduate students and very young professionals, the kind of folks who live on pizza and who aren’t yet appropriately paranoid about what it means to be on your own in a world full of strangers; Wade runs his finger down the first three intercoms and all three buzz him in in rapid succession. 

The names all belong to people he’ll never meet, of course, but at least they’re polite.

He bounds up the stairs in twos and threes until he’s standing on the third floor, and his knuckles immediately leap up and knock. His heart’s pounding, his head’s racing, and his stomach feels totally sick. The pieces of his jigsaw life scatter and reform, creating hazy half-pictures before they fall apart again.

Because Emma’s right, in a way. The old Wade, the one who’s not spent the last handful of days in broken, scattered pieces, he’s actually an okay guy.

And this Wade, the screwed up one? He _misses_ that.

“Wade?” a voice asks when the door finally opens, and for the first time in a week, Wade finds himself standing face-to-face with Darcy Lewis. Her hair’s a dark, damp knot on top of her head, and she wears a fuzzy purple robe over a tiny tank-top and equally-tiny sleep shorts. Her socks are tall and stripey, definitely not something she wore to the office. He hears crappy TV in the background and, for a moment, actually feels the welling-up of abject guilt. 

Because Darcy’s relaxing on a Friday night, and he’s ruining it with _this_.

He means _this_ to be a jumble of words, too—sense or nonsense, it doesn’t really matter, just noise to fill up the silence between them—but then an uncontrollable urge wells up from the depths of his belly and he surges forward to kiss her. Not any old kiss, either, but a Nicholas Sparks kind of kiss, one where he gathers her into his arms and slots their mouths together without the slightest bit of forethought. Darcy hesitates, caught up in what Wade assumes is surprise, but then she throws her arms around his neck and kisses him back, her mouth as hot and demanding as every make-out session on his couch. They stumble across her foyer, the door wide open and the TV still playing, and before Wade can really process it, he’s pressing her against the nearest wall and reacquainting their tongues with one another.

She groans in response, enthusiastic and hungry, and hitches a leg up around his. He presses his thigh into the space she’s created, crowding her, _demanding_ her attention, and her whole body reacts. She rolls against him like the waves of a choppy sea, and he kisses her harder, dirtier, trying to dig the anchor of all his other emotions out of the sand.

After all, a ship that’s dropped anchor is a lot more likely to be ripped apart by a storm. 

The problem is, everything else that’s happened—all the conversations, the laughter, the warmth, the _want_ —is too heavy for him to lift on his own.

When he pulls back, away from Darcy’s full lips and the tease of her tongue against the back of his teeth, she gasps in surprise and flattens herself against the wall. She looks like a rumpled, disheveled, entirely too sexy goddess, but he knows the second he looks at her that the empty space in his belly’s not hers to fill. 

He wonders whether it ever was.

“Wade?” she asks, breathless and panting. He watches her whole body heave. When her fingernails reach up to scratch against his scalp, he reaches up and gently untangles her hands from his hair. He holds onto her fingers for entirely too long.

“I,” he starts to say, but the word sticks in his throat. It’s weighed down like the rest of him, chain that ties him to the bottom of the ocean. He presses his nose against one of her hands and then lets her go. She slumps against the wall as he steps away, separating them by one arm’s length and then another. For once, she’s not angry at him, just lost.

She deserves so much better than his fucked-up brain. She deserves to be something more than a placeholder for impossible things.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, and then immediately turns and walks out the door.

Wade hears her shouting after him, her voice murky with confusion, but he refuses to look back. It’s too dangerous to turn around, to surrender himself to the siren song that he knows will drown him along with the thousand sailors before him. He charges down the stairs and out into the cold night, his ears so full of the sound of his own heartbeat that it drowns out Darcy’s voice.

He wants to feel something. He wants to be overwhelmed with regret, with want, with need, with _anything_. He wants something to pick him up and carry him back into Darcy’s building, to force him to make amends and carry her into her bed. He wants a normal life, one where he can choose the path of least resistance and never look back.

But instead, he digs out his cell phone and scrolls down until he finds Carol’s name in his contacts list.

_txt me the dirctons to that bar_ , he types, not caring if any of the words are spelled right. _i sudnly need a drnk_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This weekend, I am hosting a [Motion Practice Friday](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/64350688370/its-motion-practice-friday), the day where I answer real questions from real Motion Practitioners! If you have any questions about the universe, please throw them at my tumblr, and I will endeavor to put your mind to rest. Or make you nervous for people's futures. I mean, depends on what you ask.


	14. Filling the Holes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade screws up. And yeah, sure, you could easily argue that he’s screwed up since the _first_ chapter, but this one feels bigger. But it’s also the first domino in the line, though, and you know how it is with those things: they topple one into another until they’ve all fallen down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the outline for one scene from this chapter last December while flying between Portland and Seattle. The song playing on my iPod at that time--the song that inspired the scene, in a way--was ["Domino" by Jessie J](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJtB55MaoD0%22). It is mentioned in the chapter as well, of course, but in case you wanted to listen.
> 
> (And yes, I know how funny it is that a song named "Domino" inspired a scene with Nate Summers. My brain is weird.)
> 
> My betas make this dream the best I've ever known, because they are consistently amazing. I mean, how many of your friends look up how to properly spell the word Febreze for you? Not many, I'll reckon. Thanks, Jen and saranoh!

“Uh, you wanna slow down there, tiger?” asks Jessica Drew.

“No,” Wade replies, and he slams his empty beer bottle down on the table before belching long, loud, and proud.

Jessica Drew, like Carol, is dressed like one of Beyoncé’s sexy assistant dancers. Her jeans are the dark red of half-dried blood and cling to her legs like a second skin, her black top is mostly-sheer and allows glimpse of a tight black camisole underneath, and her ears sparkle in the dance floor lights like tiny silver disco balls. Really, were it not for the bright pink _birthday girl_ crown on her head, she could probably pick up nine-tenths of the men in the bar, Bobby Drake included.

But the crown—complete with fluffy pink feathers and sparkly plastic jewels, by the way—is clearly stolen from a four-year-old, and coupled with Jessica’s _I’m dangerous and I know it_ smile, it chases away even the handsiest of Friday night bar predators.

Wade suspects Jessica likes it that way.

Wade also suspects that a fifth beer’ll shift him directly from buzzed to tipsy, but right now, he gives exactly zero shits about anything. No, really, ask him if he cares about the texts that keep chiming through on his phone, or the voice mail that’s waiting for him, or the fact that opening his shirt past the second button risks someone noticing his Frankenstein-style scar tissue freak show and commenting on it. Because the answer to all those things is _I give precisely zero shits, thanks for your concern_.

He signals the bartender for another beer, and Jessica Drew—pink princess birthday girl—smacks him upside the head before she treks back out onto the dance floor in her incredibly precarious shoes.

The bar in question is one of those places that’s meant to cater to vaguely classy college-aged assholes, complete with a classy “small plates” menu and lots of unpronounceable, fruity drinks. Except on Friday nights, apparently, the dining tables pretty much disappear and the place turns into a shitty Eurotrash dance club that’s swarming with attractive young professionals. Everywhere Wade looks, he finds himself staring down members of the twenty-six-to-forty demographic, most of whom are without wedding rings and all of whom look hungry for a sweaty, slinky dance partner. Even Bobby Drake, a man with two left feet and entirely too much Caucasian rhythm, is out shaking his groove thing with Carol Danvers.

They actually pair up pretty nicely. Too bad one is terrifying and the other has never known a woman’s touch.

Wade’s cell phone chimes again, vibrating weakly against the tabletop, and he glances down just in time to watch the number of text messages from Darcy Lewis shift from six to seven. He hits the lock button to shut off the screen and stares at the reflection of the dance floor lights shining against the black. They almost completely eradicate the shape of his own face—pale, exhausted, lost in his own murky life—and he appreciates that.

He also appreciates his fifth beer and the splash of hops on his tongue.

Across the dance floor, almost entirely hidden from view by the pulsing throng of bodies, is a duo of broad-shouldered men caught in conversation. For most people, it might be hard to tell them apart through the crowd—they’re both tall and strong, both dressed in white shirts, both sipping amber liquid between conspiratorial smiles—but Wade knows the one as well as he knows his own heart and mind. Every detail, from the unmistakable shock of silver hair to the fine laugh lines, are etched on Wade’s brain like a brand. He imagines the width of quick fingers against glass, the warmth of a chuckle, the intensity of a gaze, and he feels his heart slowly start to unravel.

He picks up his beer and drinks without tasting it.

Elsewhere in the bar, Nate Summers laughs and tips his glass at Hank McCoy.

Wade watches the conversation for a long time—longer than necessary, really, since he stares through two new horde-controlling techno remixes _and_ orders a sixth beer—before someone else wanders over. He assumes it’ll be Jessica or Carol, hell-bent on dragging him out of his doldrums and forcing him onto the dance floor, but the fingers that lift the beer bottle out of his grip lack sparkly painted nails. What’s more, they’re blunt, masculine fingers, attached to a blunt, masculine arm and—

“Your husband’s here,” he tells the dirty thief. He holds his hand out for his beer. “He catches you drinking out of another man’s bottle, he might consider it cheating.”

“Yeah, I’m really not worried about that,” Bobby replies, and finishes off the last couple swallows without coming up for breath. He sets it down with a heavy _thunk_ , his eyes focusing in on Wade and only Wade. He feels a little like a bug under a microscope, honestly, which is weird because Bobby’s not the scientist in his family. He almost points that out, too, but Bobby interrupts the thought. “I don’t know why you’re here if you’re not planning on having any fun.”

“Drinking is fun,” Wade points out. Bobby tightens his jaw, but Wade shrugs in response. “What? It is. Maybe not in small doses, but in big, ugly, sadness-killing doses, it’s about the greatest thing on the planet.”

“You’re not supposed to drink the sadness away.”

“You know, people say that all the time, but I’m not sure I believe them.” Wade raises his arm to wave at the bartender a seventh time, but Bobby grabs his wrist. His fingers are cold from the beer bottle, and also really firm. Wade knows about the second part because the other guy starts dragging him away from the table and toward the dance floor. “I’m supposed to be watching Jessica and Carol’s drinks,” he defends. He claws at the table, but it’s made of this slippery plastic stuff that he can’t quite grip. Fucking IKEA. 

“They can buy new drinks,” Bobby replies. He’s a lot stronger than he looks. Also, he’s wearing a black button-down shirt with too many buttons open. He looks like he walked off a Calvin Klein shoot. Not the underwear kind of shoot, though. No, he definitely has on a pair of thigh-hugging jeans that probably inspire his husband to open the fly with his t—

Oh, Wade’s _officially_ had too much beer. 

Bobby leads him out onto the dance floor, the very model of a modern major dance club pretty boy, and Wade’s stuck standing there and trying to bob his head to the music. Despite his reputation as the office crank, Bobby moves almost entirely like Jagger. His hips stay loose, his arms, shoulders, and thighs find the beat, and when Wade tries to slink away—because believe him, he tries with a breathtaking sort of immediacy—his sneaky dancer-fingers catch Wade by the belt and drag him close. Nearby, Carol and Jessica burst into peals of laughter, twin bells ringing out over the shitty music, and Wade flips them off.

Less nearby, but still well within view, Nate smiles at Hank like the man’s just brought peace to the Middle East. Which, in Nate’s defense, is actually possible. Wade has no idea how the Drake-hyphen-McCoy family spends their weekends.

He’s still watching that conversation when Bobby comments, “You need to say something to him.” His lips nearly brush Wade’s ear, too close for comfort, and Wade jerks back in surprise. There’s nothing predatory in Bobby’s grin, just _amused_. Wade wonders what the guy smoked before coming out, and whether he’ll share with his good, underdressed, rhythmless friend.

But that doesn’t stop him from asking, “Him who?”

Bobby rolls his eyes. “Given that you’ve only really paid attention to one person all night, I think that’s kind of obvious.”

He punctuates the comment with this pointed look, one that reminds Wade of the finely-honed tip of one of those very expensive fountain pens. Wade considers rolling his eyes right back, creating a quantum singularity of huffy teenage expressions, but distraction wins the day. 

Unfortunately, distraction is tall, wide-shouldered, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and sipping fancy booze from a fancy glass.

When he glances back in Bobby’s direction, Bobby just quirks an eyebrow. “What do you want me to say to him, huh?” he asks, throwing up his hands. It sort of works as a dance move, actually. “Because the only material I’ve got right now is that he never smiles and has crazy Paul Bunyan hands.”

“Uh-huh,” Bobby returns. It drips with petulant teenage sarcasm. Wade’s suddenly glad that they met at a moot court competition in law school and not, say, even twenty-four hours earlier than that. The longer he’s friends with Bobby, the more he thinks he might’ve hated teenage Bobby. “And you’re staring at him because?”

“I’m not staring at Nate, I’m staring at your husband.” Bobby bursts out laughing, so easy and free that Wade’s almost envious. The song switches to something bouncier and with less of a techno headache back beat, and he watches Bobby twist his hips. “Have you seen your man in those jeans? He puts the girl from that ‘Miss New Booty’ song to shame.”

Bobby snorts. “Wade,” he chides, because a blindfolded five-year-old with earplugs could tell that Wade’s stretching reality to its very limit.

“Get it together, bring it back to me,” Wade sings in response, and at least it cracks Bobby up again.

Carol and Jessica swing around to join them, then, and for a few minutes, the whole unsanctioned office outing _thing_ morphs into something peppy and fun. Jessica dances like she lives, uninhibited and completely insane, and Carol’s ponytail flips back and forth like a very soft horse whip. They pair off, group into a clump, and pair off again, and Wade is proud to say that he gropes Carol Danvers’s ass twice without being murdered and left for dead.

But he hardly enjoys it. Oh, no, it’s a completely lovely ass—like, that girl works out and every inch of that pert tightness proves it—but, well, distraction’s a bitch.

Distraction’s also almost finished with his drink, and the longer Wade dances, the more he’s convinced that distraction’s watching him back. The fucker.

When the girls snag two skinny boys with skinny ties and lead them away, Bobby crowds back into Wade’s personal space. He jerks his head away from that stupid table at the edge of the dance floor, surprised again by Bobby’s nearness. It’s not a big deal, he knows, but suddenly he feels exposed.

Like the momentary heady joy of actually enjoying life just all washed away.

“I know you’re interested in him,” Bobby presses, and Wade rolls his eyes instead of surrendering to the weird warmth that threatens to flood his cheeks. He tries to focus on a spot over Bobby’s shoulder instead of on the other man’s endless earnestness. It helps that the spot in question involves Jessica and Carol flanking a very attractive black man in a green polo shirt. “A blind person could see that you’re into him, and I don’t understand—”

“I think that’s pretty insulting to blind people,” Wade interrupts, because cutting into the conversation prevents it from continuing. “Like, that’s ableism. And Carol’s always lecturing us on being kind to the veterans with disabilities who come into our office—person-first language and everything—”

Bobby scowls. “I taught you person-first language.”

“—so I really think you shouldn’t say that blind people can see my theoretical attraction.”

“Theoretical?”

“Totally theoretical.” Bobby stops gyrating for a second, and Wade finds his own crooked, clumsy dance moves slowing down. They stare at one another, surrounded by grinding strangers and pumping bass. The press of bodies and music is nothing compared to the press of tension all around them, and Wade finally wets his lips. “Besides,” he says, shrugging his shoulder, “it’s not like my totally theoretical attraction is returned or anything. Or do you remember the ‘marriage is bullshit and love is for naïve children’ complaint back a couple months ago?”

Bobby releases a sound like a sudden crack of laughter. When Wade lifts his head, he’s gifted with one of the guy’s overwhelming, sunshine-bright grins. “Did you really discount him because he’s scared?” he demands.

Wade snorts at him. “Yeah, right. Because all that adds up to ‘I’m scared’ and not ‘I’m an enormous asshole who shits on people’s joy.’”

“That’s precisely what it adds up to, and I think you know it,” Bobby replies, and then, he starts bouncing to the music again. Wade tries to bounce along, but he feels like there’s a lead weight in the pit of his stomach. The result is a lot of foot-shuffling and awkward hip-shifting. Worse, when he glances back at Bobby, Bobby’s staring him down. “Here, let me ask you this,” he says, and Wade tries very hard not to scoff at the endless optimism lurking in the back of his perpetually-perky voice. “Let’s suppose you talk to him.”

“Not going to happen,” Wade points out, because on the very long list of things that might happen in the universe, having a conversation about his theoretical attraction to Nathan Summers _with_ Nathan Summers is at the actual and metaphorical bottom.

“Well, let’s say it does,” Bobby presses. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

There’s a split second where Wade thinks he might throw up in his mouth from all of Bobby’s brainlessly cute faith in humanity, but then the nausea passes. Maybe it wasn’t nausea at all, but one of those rotten egg burps courtesy of all that beer he drank. Regardless, he rolls his eyes. “You mean besides the scenario where he and I end up unable to even make eye contact and the whole office transforms into a black hole of unresolved sexual tension?” he asks. “Because, I mean, that one’s pretty bad.”

“That one’s also pretty much how the office is right now.”

“Which is why I’m not touching Nate Popsicle Summers with a ten-foot pole, thank you very much.”

He juts out a hip along with his answer, finality in motion (if, of course, finality is actually a thing that moves), and Bobby pulls one of his constipated old man faces. “You think that’ll really fix this?”

“I think it’s already working,” Wade returns. He swings his hips in a way that also conveniently turns him back toward his nice little IKEA knock-off table with his nice empty beer bottles, but Bobby curls his fingers in the side of Wade’s shirt and follows him around. Wade scowls at him. “What?”

“It’s not working, and you know it.” Wade huffs a breath and glances at the ceiling like he expects to see the answers to the universe up there. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot of really bright lights, but not much else. “I watched you try to ignore it, and then, I watched you shove Darcy into what I’m pretty sure is a Nate-sized hole. And you can’t honestly tell me that those things’ve gone okay.”

Wade shrugs. “They’ve not gone explosions-and-bloodshed horrible, either.”

“But is it what you want?” Bobby stops dancing again and meets his eyes. It’s a direct hit, all clear, blue honesty, and Wade again wants to throw up his slightly-more-than-five beers. “Because hey, if that’s good enough, more power to you. I could never do it.”

“You’ve dated literally one person in your entire life. You have no idea what you can and can’t do.”

“You’re right,” Bobby admits, holding up his hands. Whatever his reason for raising them, though, it’s definitely not because he’s surrendering. “Once I started dating Hank, I realized I never wanted to date anyone else. And you’re nowhere close to that. At least, not with Darcy.”

“You’re implying I’ve dated someone else.”

“I think you got pretty close,” Bobby returns, and then, in a totally unprecedented moment of weird, wolf-whistles at this huge chunk of man who starts crossing the—

Oh, wait, that’s just Hank. Man. Take the guy out of an ugly grandpa sweater and he actually looks like a whole new person. He slings an arm low around Bobby’s hips, all possessive and unexpectedly sexy, before even bothering to glance in Wade’s direction. “I’m stealing your dance partner,” he says simply.

“Because what the world really needs is two rhythmless nerds rubbing all over each other,” Wade returns, but Hank just laughs. But then he and his husband immediately fall into one another’s personal space, familiar and sickeningly happy, and for a second, Wade just stands and watches.

Then, he realizes that there are things in the world best left to his imagination and steps far, far away from the two of them. Like, seriously, he makes a beeline off the dance floor, do not pass “go” and do not collect any form of currency. Not even yen. Put that down right now.

But here’s the catch, right? The table he ends up standing in front of, with his shirt sticking slightly to his chest and his breath coming in tighter little pants than he ever intended it to do, it’s not some unoccupied, anonymous table.

“Wade,” Nate says quietly, and Wade promptly forgets how his brain works.

The song almost immediately switches to that Jessie J song about taking people down like dominos—lyrics that’ve never made sense to him, by the way. Wade likes the song enough that it’s on his running playlist, and his “I need to be in a good mood now” playlist, and he’s maybe sung it in the shower a few times. It’s a decent song, catchy in the right ways, and also? The bass line matches the sudden, crazed pounding of his heart.

He can feel the chasm between them, deep and wide as it’s become over the last couple weeks, but he can also see the flimsy rope bridge that stretches across it. And if he’s slow and patient, he thinks he might be able to inch across to where he used to be, over on the other side.

That’s precisely what he hopes to say when his lips part, muddled metaphor and all.

Instead, he opens his mouth and asks, “You wanna dance?”

Nate freezes, his glass halfway to his lips, and across the table, Wade freezes too. He replays the words back to himself once, twice, and then four or five more times afterwards, but nope. Nope, every time he mulls back over his stupid, clumsy mouth and his untrustworthy tongue, he hears the same three words looping like a broken record.

Nate, on the other hand, just stares him down, his face caught in this totally unreadable expression. Not blank, either, but _foreign_. Like he’s working very hard to play his proverbial cards very close to his enormous chest.

Wade wets his lips. “I mean,” he says, because he either salvages the conversation now or trots off to drown himself in the bathroom toilet, your pick, “we’re at a club. Well, technically, a bar-slash-club, but I really think the club part’s winning out tonight. And since the club thing’s winning, I think we might want to dance. Weird, sure, but that’s what normal people do at places like this, and I figure, hey, normal’s worth a shot.”

He stops rubbing the back of his neck once he finishes the whole explanation. He stares at his tingly fingers and wonders exactly when the rubbing stated. When he looks up from his own traitorous hand—because that’s the theme of the night, body parts that betray their owner—he realizes that Nate’s placed his glass back on the table. His big fingers cup it carefully, but his face remains perfectly neutral.

Wade hates his lawyer face. He’s seen the real Nate, the one that smiles and laughs and hugs little girls goodbye. The robotic lawyer with no soul’s the world’s poorest substitute for that.

But then, finally, Nate says, “No.”

“No?” Wade blurts. Unthinkingly, by the way, but that’s to be expected. His mouth fumbles around for the right words while he watches Nate gather up his coat. “Seriously? You’re leaving? I come over to talk to you, and you’re just _going_?”

“Yes,” Nate replies, and walks away.

For a long time—or, at least, what feels like a long time, what with the swimming stomach and the pounding heart and all that—Wade just stands there, staring stupidly at Nate’s abandoned glass and wondering, exactly, where everything went wrong. He traces it back to the parking lot with Hope, sure, but then then the flashback continues. He zooms past Valentine’s Day and burritos, rewinds through conversations over chicken nuggets and offers for Darcy to bring him coffee, and lands right back on that stupid conversation in the conference room.

Right back to when Bobby’d discussed marriage like the holy grail of happy endings and Nate’d masked his hurt by being a dick.

Because that, Wade realizes like a bolt from above, is _Nate’s_ default reaction to just about everything.

He surges forward as Jessie J insists that she can taste tension (and that tension, in fact, tastes like smoke, whatever the hell that means) and downs the last of Nate’s drink in one hard gulp. It’s whisky of some kind, sharp and too strong, and he coughs as the heat flashes through him like a wildfire. It propels him away from the table and through the crowd, past the gyrating mass of strangers and not-strangers—and wow, Carol is really loving on Mr. Green Polo Shirt, good for her—and out the front doors. The blast of cold nearly knocks him back into the bar, but somehow he forces himself onto the sidewalk, propelled by beer, whisky, and desperation.

He wishes, just once, that he’d thought to grab his coat.

The bar’s shoved in between two small restaurants in an older part of town, and the narrow street that stretches both east and west is lined with cars as far as the eye can see. Wade whips his head around, the streetlights flashing in his vision as he scans the night for a familiar shock of silver hair. A little ways down, a giggling couple squeezes together to leech body heat; on the corner, a guy who is probably not yet twenty-one clutches a mailbox and hurls all over his shoes.

And across the street, shoulders hunched against the cold as he walks in front of an old brick building, is—

“Nate!” Wade shouts, but the wind grabs his voice and carries it off until it’s a hopeless echo in the night. He hops off the curb and immediately runs across the street without bothering to look both ways. His breath leaps in and out of his lungs in greedy pants, but for whatever reason, the other man keeps walking.

Wade almost face-plants in his haste to climb over the last chunks of disgusting black snow and land on the sidewalk. He feels overwhelmed, drunk on air, and he knows that the alcohol is totally blameless. No, this feeling’s born of an entirely different kind of intoxication, one he’s been fighting against for weeks. 

Half a block down, Nate keeps walking.

Which is precisely why Wade hollers, “Nathan Moonbeam Summers!”

The man-tower on the sidewalk stills immediately, and for some reason he can’t explain, Wade stills too. He’s expecting another fight, he thinks, the kind of knock-down drag-out that Nate’d avoided on Monday by wearing his _enormous toolbox_ hat to work, but instead, he watches Nate’s shoulders lift slightly. When he turns around, his collar flipped up against the cold and his hands deep in his pockets, he’s actually smiling.

Not, like, with the whole of his face or anything. No, this smile features just the corners of his eyes. 

The fact that even a _tiny_ floods Wade’s stomach with warmth is, well, a little sad.

“You’ll have to remind me what number we’re on,” Nate comments after a few seconds of perfect evening silence.

Wade shrugs. “I’m pretty sure I lost count weeks ago,” he admits. Nate’s shoulders shake when he chuckles, and Wade— 

Well, nobody’s perfect, least of all Wade. He certainly never learned the valuable life skill of leaving a gift horse’s mouth alone.

Which is why, slowly, he starts to close the distance between them. 

The fifty feet of sidewalk that separates them shrinks thanks to the miracle of human locomotion and Wade’s thoroughly battered work shoes, and as twenty feet transform into ten and then five, he can finally study Nate’s face. It’s shadowed in the weird off-white light of the street lamp, all the laugh lines and little imperfections showing, and Wade totally loses track of whether he’s breathing in or out.

He almost forgets _to_ breathe when Nate’s chin dips long enough for them to find each other’s eyes.

They stand like that for a long time, suspended on the sidewalk with all of two feet between them. Wade imagines he can feel the warmth radiating off Nate’s chest, distorting the air around them like the heat off asphalt on a summer’s day. The bar doors open for a moment and the bass beat of a song—maybe the one about dominos, maybe another—cuts through the darkness, but Wade’s convinced that his heartbeat his louder.

“I’m so sick of things sucking,” Wade hears himself saying. It’s like an out of body experience, like he’s floating above he and Nate and watching as his hands start jumping around in an attempt to shape the words into physical _things_. Nate stares at him, his expression still unreadable but his eyes soft, and somehow, Wade keeps on talking. “Everything lately, it’s like _Real Housewives_ spin-off _shitty_ , and I can’t help but think that it’s because I keep trying to stick round pegs into square holes. You know? I keep reaching out for the wrong thing, when really, I need the _right_ one.”

The tiny almost-smile that crinkles Nate’s fine lines drops away. “Meaning?” he asks. The single word sounds like a blessing and a curse, all at once.

Wade swallows. “Meaning that this next part? It needs to be right. Because if it’s wrong, and I’m back at the start, I don’t know what’ll happen next.”

In some parallel version of this universe, where Nate Summers isn’t an android and Wade Wilson isn’t a broken jigsaw puzzle of a man with his pieces scattered from here to New Jersey and back again, the conversation continues. They sort out issues with words in that better, shinier, happier world, and everyone ends up with a greater understanding of themselves as human beings. Basically, in that other dimension, Wade’s life closely resembles a Lifetime Original Movie.

But not in this universe, and unfortunately, this is the only universe he’ll ever know.

Which is why, when Nate opens his mouth to ask what the hell Wade’s talking about, Wade rushes forward, grabs him by his coat collar, and kisses him.

It’s the sort of kiss reserved for horny high school students, uneven and messy right from the get-go, and Wade spends the first half-second mentally cursing his lowered inhibitions and Nate’s pale-lipped mouth. But then, before any of his higher thought processes kick in and force his self-preservation to rear its ugly head, Nate tilts his head and kisses him back.

It’s hard and fast, a train accident of a kiss that sears through every inch of Wade’s body, and his last fraying threads of self-control snap the second he feels Nate’s teeth graze along his bottom lip. Instinct kicks into high gear, and suddenly, Wade can’t track what’s happening: his arms grapple to hold Nate around the neck as Nate presses him forcibly into the nearby brick wall; their legs tangle while lips part for the kind of moans that’re usually only featured on certain types of websites; Wade’s whole body tips up into Nate, offering itself to his hands and his heat, and Nate returns the favor. He tries to memorize every touch—the way Nate claws at his shirt and the softness of Nate’s hair, the press of Nate’s body and the _heat_ of his mouth—while knowing that they’ll all escape like grains of sand through his fingers.

In the end, he surrenders his brain as much as his body and his mouth, and lets Nate overpower every inch of him, inside and out.

When Nate pulls back, he’s panting and wild-eyed, his hair sticking up in a thousand directions and his lips red from plundering Wade’s mouth. Wade watches the sweep of his tongue and leans forward, eager to resume the kiss before the breathless exhilaration fades into something duller, but his mouth only finds air. He scrabbles for purchase on Nate’s coat but Nate’s already untangling their limbs and stepping back into the lamp light.

“Nate?” he manages. His voice sounds raw and distant, like it belongs to an altogether other human being. “What’s—”

“You have a girlfriend.”

The words are gunshots, perfectly spaced apart and sharply punctuated, and Wade feels mouth drop open without his permission. He tries to close it, but none of his muscles want to cooperate; what blood’s not dropped straight into the front of his pants is racing around his body, spurred on by his hammering heart. “I—”

“No,” Nate interrupts, holding up a hand. It trembles for a second, just long enough for Wade to catch the shake. “You have a girlfriend, Wade, and I am not that person.”

A thousand explanations pop into Wade’s head, but they twist into these wordy jumbles he can’t iron out. On the sidewalk, Nate pushes back his messy hair with his trembling hand, and Wade’s overwhelmed by the urge to grab that hand and hold it.

Or maybe it’s just an urge to grab _Nate_ , all of him, and hold him. To pull their bodies flush together and cling on until tangled words don’t fucking matter.

Either way, the only thing he manages to blurt out is a half-hearted, “But.”

Whether something belongs after that single, useless conjunction—an answer, a promise, a plea, a curse—he’ll never know. Because when Nate raises his eyes from the ground and finally looks back in Wade’s direction, the words all fragment and break.

He’s seen Nate angry, he thinks. He’s seen him happy, frustrated, amused, betrayed, and even disappointed.

But right now, standing in the flickering light of a street lamp, his collar half-raised against the cold, Nate Summers just looks _hurt_.

When he repeats the word, “No,” it escapes in a whisper that catches on the wind and then disappears.

And this time, when he walks away, Wade makes no effort to follow.

 

==

 

“It was horrible,” Wade groans, pressing his face into the couch cushion.

The couch in question is overstuffed, beige, and smells like Febreze. Actually, no. Febreze sort of sits on top of everything in a futile attempt to mask the couch’s _real_ smell. Underneath, Wade catches whiffs of cheap Chinese food, greasy pizza, expensive Phil Coulson aftershave, and good choices. He’s totally not sure what good choices smell like, exactly, but he knows that they definitely _don’t_ smell like all the things that are still lingering in his nostrils: sweat, whisky, wind, and Nate’s cologne.

God, Nate smells good.

Wade, on the other hand, is pretty sure he smells like cheap beer and cheaper whisky. At least, it’s definitely what his vomit smelled like when he threw up all over Carol’s shoes on the sidewalk outside the bar-club. He’d expected her to shriek about it—hell, he’d expected her to punch him, allowing him the opportunity to feel something other than misery and regret for a few minutes—but instead, she’d stroked his hair away from his forehead and sent Bobby back into the bar for some water.

Sober Wade suspects that Carol’s kindness is a sign of the apocalypse. Worse, he’s absolutely certain that his totally-classy tactic of barfing up alcohol and feelings proved to Carol, Bobby, Hank, and Jessica that he maybe has a couple of issues he’s not really dealing with.

Drunk Wade, on the other hand, rubs his face against the upholstery and announces, “I like the way your couch smells.”

Somewhere else in the living room—not really within arm’s reach, but not so far away that Wade’s totally clueless to its existence—there’s a murmuring sound. Wade can’t really figure out what it is, exactly, but then again, he’s not actually _trying_ to figure it out, either. No, his brain’s abandoned all semblance of rationale thought and decided to focus back in on Nate for the ten millionth time since Wade dragged himself into the back seat of a cab. His entire consciousness is one big ball of Nate-awareness—Natewareness?—and he runs through every half-remembered sensation like he’s on that _This is Your Life_ show: the way Nate’s tongue coaxed its way between his lips, the way Nate’s _thigh_ coaxed its way between his legs, the rasp of those big hands against his thin shirt, the heat and the nearness and the—

“He’s drunk,” the murmuring observes. Wade’s not sure why, for the first time, he can parse out actual words. He suspects maybe the murmur’s done it on purpose, like it wants Wade to overhear.

It also sounds sympathetic. Not, like, _completely_ sympathetic, but somewhere on the sympathy spectrum. He decides immediately that he likes this murmur.

Just this murmur, though, because the other one responds with a little frustrated noise and then, as if that’s not enough, follows it up by saying, “It’s one in the morning, Clint.” This murmur is _grumpy_. Of course, it kind of stands to reason that most groggy wee-hours-off-the-morning murmurs’ll sound grumpy. It’s kind of the textbook definition of a murmur, or so his booze-addled brain reasons. But _this_ murmur definitely lacks the sympathetic undercurrent.

If anything, it’s got a pissed-off undercurrent.

Wade feels suddenly guilty about that one. After all, he’s sort of the cause of the undercurrent, what with his broken decision-making skills and the fact that his so-called “sad puppy” look inspired a half-dozen women to buy him drinks and listen to tales of his failed love life. If he weren’t such a pathetic bag of bones and awfulness, he might be lying on a very different couch, pressing his face into a very different patch of fabric.

He belches a little, nothing too disgusting, and decides he needs to make the situation better.

Which is precisely why he says, “The couch isn’t big enough for both of us.”

Both the murmurs fall completely silent for a single beat. Somehow, Wade recognizes that it’s the sympathetic murmur—murmurer, maybe, since he thinks the nightlight in the kitchen confirms that the noises are originating from people and not some sort of fever dream—that releases a long-suffering sigh. “What are you talking about?” 

“The couch.” Wade picks up his head just enough to turn it away from _eau de good choices_. The murmurs definitely belong to two humanoid shapes, both of which are hovering in the space between the couch and the kitchen. They’re not far apart in height, but one’s a lot more compact than the other. Remind him not to start a fist-fight with that one. “If you sleep on the couch, and I’m on your couch, there’s not enough couch for the both of us.”

The grumpier of the two murmurers shakes its almost-human head. “I am not dealing with this right now,” he decides.

“Gimme ten minutes,” the other person-shaped shadow replies, and then shifts around to look more fully at his companion. Now that nobody’s blocking the light from the kitchen, Wade can clearly catch the finer points of Clint’s features: the spread of his fingers when he touches Coulson’s bare arm, the concern tightening the lines on his face, his massive faux-hawk of bedhead. Needless to say, Wade groans and drops his face back onto the couch. “I just wanna check on him.”

Wade can imagine the truly epic Phil Coulson eye-roll that serves as a response. Or, at least, part one of the response, because part two sounds a lot like a smooch. Wade’s not exactly prepared to listen to smooching.

Or at least, that’s his excuse for groaning again and shoving his face even more firmly into the couch cushion. The smell of Febreze is an improvement over the scents that keep haunting his brain, the spark of spice on a cold March breeze. If he smothers himself, he thinks maybe he’ll be free of those crystal-clear instant-replay memories. Dead people can’t recall scents, right? That’s not a thing. At least, he doesn’t think.

The floor creaks in a vaguely rhythmic way, then stops all of a foot away from his head. “You’re drunk,” Clint observes. Like that’s news or something.

“Yeah,” Wade replies. His voice is definitely muffled by the couch, but whatever.

“You took a cab to my place instead of yours—or anywhere else.”

He’s pretty sure he hates Clint’s actual guts, right about now. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Ours is not to reason why. Right? Isn’t that a saying? Please tell me that’s a saying, because everything got hazy about a half-hour ago and I’m not sure—”

“Wade.” It’s clear from Clint’s tone that his thin strand of sympathy is fraying, and _fast_. Like, if Wade’s life was _The Great Mouse Detective_ , he’d need to break out of the trap in the next roughly half-second or risk certain mousy death.

He turns his head just enough that he can resume breathing. “Because Bobby made me kiss Nate,” he answers. Hey, it’s true. Mostly-true. Kind of— He’s drunk, okay? Cut him some slack.

“Bobby made you— What?” Credit to the guy with the dorky boyfriend and awful bedhead, because he sounds appropriately confused. Wade’s confused, too. He’s glad that they’re at least on the same page.

“You kind of had to be there,” Wade informs him, and, finally, he shifts his weight to look up at Clint. The guy’s standing right next to the couch in his entirely too-tight boxer briefs and a threadbare t-shirt, his veiny muscle-porn arms crossed over his chest. His stance’s pretty confrontational, but his face lacks the usual scrunched-up crankiness. Actually, his face looks pretty—

Oh god.

Clint’s staring down at him like maybe he’s _sorry_ for Wade, and that’s the worst. Like, never mind the fighting with Darcy, the screaming at his client’s tail lights while Emma watched, the horribly unplanned and ultimately disastrous kiss at Darcy’s, and—because learning a lesson is apparently a sissy move—the horribly unplanned and ultimately disastrous kiss outside the bar: Clint Barton’s sorry face is the absolute suckiest thing on the goddamn planet.

Clint leans over to flip on the lamp, leaving Wade to curl into himself and hiss at the light until it stops burning his eyes. His brain feels like it’s being pan-seared in a fire of justice and guilt, and he covers his face with both hands. When he finally dares to peek out between his fingers a whole string of seconds later, he discovers that Clint’s settled onto the arm of the couch.

Wade presses his face back into the cushion. “Your couch really does smell like good life choices,” he says.

“You kissed Nate,” Clint replies, which has exactly nothing to do with his couch. Wade nods. “And you’re still dating Darcy?”

“I _really_ need to not talk about Darcy right now,” Wade informs him. He also realizes that the burn of the upholstery against his face reminds him of the burn of Nate’s barely-there stubble. He pillows his head on his arm. “Because I’ve done the whole ‘we talk about Darcy’ conversation in my head, and it always ends in you telling me that Darcy will kill me. Which, by the way, she can’t do if I kill myself and let your terrifying boyfriend help you hide my body.”

Clint snorts. “Don’t tempt him,” he retorts, and Wade almost cracks a smile. Silence sweeps over the living room, and once it settles heavily around them, it lasts. Not just for a couple seconds, but for a long, _long_ time, long enough that Wade thinks maybe Clint’s stood up and abandoned him to die. 

But when he slowly lifts his head and looks up, he finds Clint still sitting there, watching him with his usual creepy calm. He must’ve dominated at elementary school staring contests, back in the day.

“Why?” he asks after they stare at each other for a couple seconds. It’s the least helpful question in human history.

Wade scrubs a hand over his face. “Why what?”

The creepy calm breaks when Clint levels him a truly unpleasant look. “Why did you kiss Nate?”

“I don’t know,” Wade admits.

“Wade—”

“No, seriously, that’s the thing: I don’t _know_.” His body decides to rebel, just then, but not in the _hurling all over the carpet a month before Clint moves out_ sort of way. Instead, he’s filled with this weird energy, and before he can really track what’s happening, he’s kneeling on the couch and gesturing with hands that refuse to calm the fuck down. “I don’t know why being with Darcy isn’t the greatest thing in the universe, I don’t know why Nate can be a dick to me and leave me still wanting to stick my tongue down his throat, and I don’t know why I feel like I’m spinning my wheels every hour of every day.” He throws up his hands, thinking that’ll help, but the franticness continues. It compels him off the couch, drives his fingers into his hair, and burns through him like jet fuel. “It’s like every time I think he’s out of my system—like toxins after a juice cleanse, at least according to Carol ‘Blended Kale is Totally a Food Group’ Danvers—he sneaks right back in there with his smile or his burritos or his adorable daughter—”

“His daughter?” Clint repeats. He sounds a little shocked. Then again, Wade’s pretty sure Clint’s never interacted with a kid any younger than Stark’s teenager, so maybe the surprise is warranted.

“—and I’m stuck standing in the middle of this mess I’ve created while everything smolders around me!”

He tosses up his hands again, just for good measure, and leaves Clint to stare at him as he stands, well, in the middle of the living room. It feels, for a second, like standing in his mess—the mess that leaves people staring, their faces full of concern and sympathy and other emotions that Wade’s absolutely not interested in entertaining right now—but then the feeling fades. Instead, he ends up frozen and stupid in the middle of the room, staring at his sympathetic friend and feeling mostly empty.

There’s a dinner-shaped hole in his belly, thanks to the whole “vomiting on the sidewalk” thing.

And there’s another hole, a bigger one, that’s plagued him for a lot longer than the last couple hours.

He’s still a stupid, clueless statue standing between the TV and coffee table when Clint asks, “Whatever happened to yolo?”

Wade stops staring at his hands to shrug. “Yolo’s pretty much dead now. I think it was mostly part of the 2012 zeitgeist and didn’t really make the transition to—”

Clint waves him off like a pesky summer fruit fly. “Not the phrase, the way of life. Weren’t you all about embracing the day? Doing the scary thing no matter what the scary thing might do back?”

Wade opens his mouth to present his very good answer to that question, but no sound escapes. Not because he can’t spitball some sort of bullshit that sounds okay—story of his life, in case maybe you’re just tuning into the story to check for a happy ending or something—but because there’s not actually a _right_ answer. There’s no explanation for the bolus of fear that lives in his belly even when it’s empty, or for the walking disaster area that’s become his life.

He exhales slowly and, finally, shakes his head. “Yolo won’t work when you don’t know what you’re afraid of,” he says, which is not a very good answer at all.

But for some super weird reason, it causes the corners of Clint’s mouth to kick up in a weird little smile. “I know what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to know someone else’s heart of darkness when they _themselves_ don’t—”

“You’re afraid of what happens if you’re happy for once.” Each word feels like a stone dropping heavily into Wade’s stomach. He tries to breathe around the feeling, but his chest seizes so hard that he literally needs to drop his ass and sit down right then. The nearest flat surface is the coffee table; it groans but holds up enough that he stops worrying about IKEA splinters in his ass. “I know because I used to be, too.”

The next stretch of silence that fills the space between them feels longer and wider than the first, and eventually, Clint pushes himself to his feet and disappears in the direction of the bedroom. Wade stays on the coffee table, his elbows on his thighs, and stares into the darkened hallway. He hears murmuring again, clearly a conversation between Clint and a not-sleeping Coulson. It’s white noise, a prickling of static over thoughts that won’t shut up, and he closes his eyes as he listens to it.

He tries to remember happiness. Not stupid, clueless childhood happiness—everybody’s happy as a kid if only because they don’t know better—but actual, _wrap your fingers around it and hold on tight_ adult joy. Because as far as he can recall, his life’s trended toward shit from the time his mom left, and he’s still clawing his way back from that.

Clint’s pretty light on his feet, apparently, because when Wade opens his eyes again, the guy’s tossing two pillows and a thick fleece blanket onto the couch. “Phil says he’ll kill you if you use his toothbrush,” he says simply. Wade blinks at him, and then at the pair of basketball shorts and the old t-shirt the guy drops on top of the pillows. 

“I thought you were going to come back in here and tell me to fix my life,” he admits. He feels stupid even as the words fall out of his mouth, like he maybe underestimated one of his very few friends. 

“You can’t fix it ‘till the morning,” Clint replies with a shrug. “Might as well get some sleep.” 

Their eyes meet, just for a couple seconds, before Clint sort of shakes his head to himself and heads back toward the bedroom. He’s not _quite_ there, his back still illuminated by the lamp he’d switched on earlier, when Wade blurts, “Hey, Clint.”

Whatever that expression is, the one that Clint tosses over his shoulder, Wade can’t name it. It’s exasperated but fond, exhausted but kind, and still just the smallest bit concerned. The pit of Wade’s stomach twists around on itself. He wonders for a second what it’d be like if he and Clint weren’t friends, and then? He perishes the _fuck_ out of that thought.

Shut up. You can totally use “perish” like that.

“It’s worth it, right?” he asks, his voice tremulous and foreign in the back of his throat. He coughs a little, but it definitely doesn’t help. “The being happy, I mean, it’s worth the uncertainty and the pain and the everything maybe blowing up in your face, yeah?”

It’s kind of amazing how Clint Barton, hardass attorney and general grump, transforms into an entirely different human being when he smiles. “Without a fucking doubt,” he answers, and somehow, Wade instinctually knows just how much he means it.

 

==

 

“I, uh, think we need to talk,” Wade says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

It’s a gusty, blustery, _Winnie the Pooh_ adjective spring day, the kind where you can’t actually fight the drizzle with an umbrella because it’ll just snap the damn thing inside out. Wade knows this because he’s spent the last half-hour watching the wind and rain from the bench just outside the back door to the judicial complex. The massive stone overhang protected him from the wet, but not the cold, and now—standing on the landing just before the last set of steps, his flimsy windbreaker too thin for the weather—he feels every last bit of the chill.

In front of him, Darcy rolls her full lips together and casts her eyes down toward the parking lot. “Yeah, I think you’re right,” she replies, and starts walking.

Wade allows her a five-second head start before following. He figures she deserves at least that after everything: the second weekend of near-radio silence, the awkward text messages exchanged throughout the day on Monday, the constantly-avoided eye contact in the hallway outside Judge English’s courtroom that morning. Darcy’d replaced one of the perfectly-groomed interns during two of Clint’s hearings, too, meaning that every time Wade glanced up from his cell phone in the gallery, he’d stared at the back of her head.

Clint’d sent him a couple dirty looks. Wade, super maturely, had finished his business, packed his bag, and cowered in the law library for the rest of the afternoon. But, hey, cowering meant avoiding both Darcy _and_ all of his own coworkers. In some cultures, that counted as a win-win.

Four or five steps in front of him—Darcy’s short _and_ wearing heels; she’s lucky Wade’s not abandoned all hope of politeness and just walked in front of her by now—Darcy steps off the curb and jaywalks toward the legally distinct Starbucks that’s catty-corner from the judicial complex. Wade, on the other hand, is nearly flattened by a bright blue Ford Escape with a text-messaging driver.

He may or may not flip her off. It’s a mystery for the ages. (Spoiler alert: he totally flipped her off.)

The intense, almost sauna-like heat inside the coffee shop hits Wade not unlike the bright blue Ford Escape nearly hit him, and he tries futilely to clear his throat of the immediately-cloying smell of coffee. The barista apparently knows Darcy by sight, because she shouts out that she’s already stated Darcy’s mocha-frappa-cuppa-cano (or whatever). Darcy nods, drops a five dollar bill on the counter, and immediately walks to the back-most corner of the shop. There’s a couch there, all worn and well-loved, and Wade watches as she strips off her coat, kicks off her heels, and tucks herself into the corner. 

Look, he knows how it sounds as an outsider: smart, quirky, fun girl walks ahead of him without a word, tucks herself up into the corner of a couch, and stares out the window, but Wade swears on the deity of your choice that it’s not all Jodi Picoult depressing, all right? It feels natural, instead, like the slow conclusion to a really good book or the quiet sweep of a door with an automatic closing mechanism. Darcy settles into her spot, pulls a newspaper off the table next to the couch, and Wade can suddenly imagine her there without him, too, without the tension that stretches between them like tautly-wound spools of thread. 

And he can maybe, in a weirdly distant way, imagine himself there with her, too. Later, of course. Laughing, instead of—

“Sorry, have you been helped?” another barista asks. She’s a pretty blonde girl with a ponytail, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, and Wade’s pretty sure she’s only asking because the girl at the milk-foamer made her.

He forces a little smile. “Just a large coffee, thanks,” he says, and Cassie—because calling somebody with a nametag _the barista_ , even in your own head, is kind of rude—nods before fetching him a cup.

By the time he pays, loads up on sugar and creamer, and drops onto the couch, Darcy’s halfway through with the Word Jumble. She taps the eraser end of her pencil against the newspaper, creating this weird staccato beat that doesn’t quite match up with her bouncing leg. Her drink, served in an enormous white mug, sends steam curling into the already too-warm air.

Wade picks at the edge of that weird cardboard sleeve they put on disposable coffee cups. “Listen,” he says, and Darcy’s pencil immediately stops tapping. He watches her face for any change—a smile, a frown, a lift of her eyebrows, _something_ —but she keeps staring at the newspaper in front of her. Wade wonders if maybe he missed the class in law school all about maintaining poker faces. It’s second nature to pretty much everybody except him. “I, uh— The way things’ve been going, I—”

“Oh my god, Wade, I’m not a fucking idiot,” Darcy snaps. She twists to stuff the newspaper and the pencil back on the little end table, nearly knocking her drink over in the process. It teeters on its saucer, and for a split second, he thinks she might throw it at either him or the wall. “Just skip to the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ so I can go home, ruin my makeup, and eat a tub of ice cream.”

Wade suspects that guilt might actually be a tangible thing, right then, because it totally wraps its fingers around his heart and squeezes until he swears his whole body is bulging with his pulse. “And if it really isn’t you? I know that’s what people say, but if it actually, one hundred percent is _not_ you, does that count for anything?”

She snorts and rolls her eyes. “I can’t believe that you’re still bullshitting me, right now.”

“I’m not.” And wow, remind him to never cross her again after this (provide she still speaks to him, of course), because that is the meanest look he’s ever seen in his entire life. He cringes backward at it and everything. “I swear, I’m not bullshitting you. I don’t even know why that’s your default, it’s—”

“It’s not like you haven’t lied to me every chance you’ve gotten?” she snaps. She flicks her head so quickly in his direction that her hair cuts through the air like strings with razors on the end. Wade summons up all his self-preservation instinct and casts his eyes down at the top of his coffee cup. “Oh, look. Three weeks later, I finally get some indication that you know you’ve been screwing me around.”

“I haven’t been screwing you around,” he says immediately. He lifts his head just in time to watch the ire flicker across Darcy’s face. Her leg keeps bouncing, more impatient than angry, and he raises his hands. Hey, you would too, if Darcy Lewis looked ready to punch you in the face. “Well, okay, yeah,” he amends, “I have. But only as much as I’ve screwed everybody else around, and probably not as much as I’ve screwed myself.”

The anger increases ten-fold and Wade feels his stomach twist into a knot. As many times as he’s rehearsed this—in the mirror, in the car, in the dressing room at Target, in bed—he never expected Darcy to be so pissed off. Hurt, upset, surprised, but not this.

This, he thinks, is what he deserves. He deserves a friend who’s ready to break her coffee mug into pieces and shiv him with the ceramic shards.

“I don’t really care about you screwing yourself,” she decides.

“No, you’re right, you don’t,” Wade replies, but it only causes Darcy to huff and cross her arms under her chest. She’s dressed in court-appropriate attire for once—a dark purple sweater, a pair of black pants, kitten heels—and he spends a second remembering why he wanted all this in the first place. Because she’s beautiful, really, even as she glares at the wall. “I mean, you shouldn’t care,” he explains, and he watches her grip on her own arms loosen. He drags his fingers through his hair. “I’m not pretending that I didn’t fuck this up, okay? But I want to unfuck it now, while I still can, before it all rots so bad that we can’t even make eye contact across a courtroom without that weird vomit-burp feeling crawling up our throats.” 

He’s apparently read the whole _silent treatment and glaring in Judge English’s courtroom_ thing right, because Darcy immediately snaps her head down toward the floor. She tries to downplay it, like she’s rolling her eyes or something, but Wade knows from the way her shoulders loosen that she’s feeling the same guilt somewhere deep in her chest. 

The only difference is, she really doesn’t have anything to be guilty about.

He swallows. “Look, you deserve something that’s not all the way fucked up all of the time and that’s not something I can give you. Because no matter how hard I try, I can never _not_ be fucked up. It’s, like, embedded in my DNA. You’d need a whole team with pickaxes and stuff to dig it out, really.” He watches as Darcy rolls her lips together. “I don’t want to fuck you up because I’m fucked up, like some sort of communicable crazy-disease.”

Her chin bobs for a second, a half-nod that’s mostly for her own benefit. When she raises her eyes, Wade swears he can read three thousand different emotions behind them: frustration and anger still, sure, but also sadness, helplessness, and confusion. He turns his coffee cup around in his hands but otherwise just lets her watch him. He wonders what she sees, and how different it is from how he sees himself.

Oh, who’s he kidding? He’s a mess, a million scattered pieces of a person. Anybody can see that from three thousand miles away.

“What do you want?” she asks after a lot of staring.

“A lot of things.”

“Name one.”

“To be your friend.”

Wade absolutely means it, right down to the pit of his stomach, but Darcy actually laughs at him. It’s a cruel bark of a laugh, barbed and full of disgust, and she tosses her head once it passes. “Do you really think that’s going to happen?” she demands, throwing up her hands. “After all the lying and disappearing and _radio silence_?” One of her index fingers jabs hard into his shoulder. Like, seriously, he grits his teeth and everything. But he also deserves way worse than a finger-jab, so he refuses to complain. “You went from being my friend to being my boyfriend,” Darcy presses, jabbing him again, “and then? You became _less_ than either of those things. There’s no magic wand for this bullshit. You’ve been a giant dick. You’ll stay one until you figure out how friendship actually works.”

Her neon green fingernail digs through his jacket and shirt. She only lets up after he grits his teeth, and even then, she looks ready to claw him again. They stare at each other, her cheeks red and her eyes narrowed, until he’s forced to stare at his hands instead. “I can count on one hand the number of actual friends I’ve ever had, you know.”

“Because that’s an excuse,” she snipes.

“No, it’s not.” He leans on the word, all elbows and sharp corners, and then snaps his eyes back up at her. His chest feels tight, like it’s all wound up in barbed wire; the longer he looks at her, the tighter it feels. He’s exhausted, all of a sudden, wrung out by emotions he’s never wanted to feel in the first place. He never wanted to be this person, he realizes—this crappy friend and worse boyfriend, this guy who grabbed the nearest girl to plaster over everything that’s wrong in his life—but it’s too late to jump in a TARDIS and change it. He’s created a fixed point in time, and what’s worse, he’s hurt Darcy.

Darcy, one of his first non-work friends.

Darcy, who he actually cares about, just not exactly in the way he thought he might.

“It’s not an excuse,” he says again, and watches as she rolls her eyes for the third or fourth time in the last ten minutes. “It’s an, I don’t know, an explanation. It’s me trying to find another way to admit that I fucked it all up and that I’m _sorry_.” That, for some reason, causes Darcy’s head to flip back in his direction. Wade feels his hands start to shake, even in their grip around his cup, but he presses forward. “Because I figure the first step to fixing all the things I’ve broken in the last couple months is to identify that, really, I did break it. It’s there, it’s shattered, and if I say it loud enough, and clearly enough, and I mean it enough, maybe someday—a long way from now—you and everybody else can forgive me for breaking it into pieces in the first place.”

The last couple words tumble out in this breathless, tremulous heap, and they leave Wade sitting there, watching Darcy, his hands flexing around his paper coffee cup. For the first time in the whole conversation—for the first time in weeks, really, ever since Jane’s trip to the hospital and their screaming match—her face softens into something familiar, and Wade—

Wade feels the bolus of shame start to unfurl.

It uncurls slowly, like one of those bath bomb things that fill your tub with long slivers of colored soap, and he feels like he can finally breathe again. At least, until Darcy tilts her head up toward the ceiling and blinks a couple times. They’re long blinks, and her throat moves while she fights with them, and—

Oh, sweet little tapdancing baby jesus, she’s not actually crying. Is she? 

“You’re not—actually crying, are you?” he asks, because Darcy Lewis is pretty much the mother of legal dragons and therefore incapable of tears.

She snorts at him but then immediately ducks her head away so he can’t actually make eye contact. “I didn’t even want to date you, you asshole,” she informs him. Her fingertips sweep at the spot under her eyes, and Wade doesn’t even need to use his hyperactive doomsday imagination to know that they come away wet. “But you came in with your stupid algorithm-machine, and you helped with the baby shower, and—”

“Yeah, well, think of it this way,” he tells her. He stretches out his leg so he can knock their knees together. She shoots him a warning look, but there’s a tiny hint of a smile playing across her lips, too. “Somewhere out there in the universe, there’s a guy who will never in his fucking life help you with a baby shower but will totally fit all your other specifications for a boyfriend. Or, you know, for a girlfriend, in case you decide that I’ve completely ruined you for men and—”

“Wade?” Darcy interrupts. There’s wet rimming her lower eyelid and clinging to her long lashes.

“Yeah?”

“Stop talking before I punch you in the face.”

Wade knows that grinning might not be the greatest reaction to that threat—after all, Darcy’s terrifying, sometimes—but he can’t help himself. And if his grip on his cup finally loosens at the way she flashes him a half-second smile, well, that’s coincidence. “I can do that,” he tells her, and she nods at him before reaching for her coffee.

They sit there for a long time, after that, sipping their coffees and staring out windows at the gray, windy day. Life, Wade decides as he watches the still-bare branches of the trees dance in the wind, is nothing like a movie. The clouds don’t part when you slog your way through the terrifying brave thing; the weather doesn’t magically improve just because the ache deep in your belly is both worse and better at the same time. The world keeps turning around in circles, full of people who hurt their children and friendships that’re ruined by selfish gestures, and all while Wade drinks his heavily-creamed coffee.

He still feels scattered and lost, like all his most vital parts’ve been scooped out with a melon baller and then tossed into the wind.

But somehow, in a way he can’t explain, he feels _less_ empty, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> KayQy wrote a short ficlet based on the events of "Permanency." It is fantastic, contains spoilers for "Permanency," and can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1010065).


	15. The Last Piece of the Jigsaw Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, Wade looks at the scattered mess of his life and starts trying to reassemble all the broken parts. He's not sure how it'll go, of course, but that's sort of the thing about life: you never know what'll happen until you take that leap of faith. Or, you know. Whatever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> During an allocution, an individual who is pleading guilty basically explains what happened at the time they committed the crime. They’re often very simple, scripted explanations. 
> 
> Certifying a class is the process by which a class action suit is created. Yes, that is a very simplified version of the concept, but I think that’s all the one-line drive-by reference really deserves. 
> 
> As this is the last substantive chapter of this story, I need to pause here and say that I would not have gotten through this story without the continued support and help of Jen and saranoh. These words are their words, too.

Just about two weeks after breaking up with Darcy, Wade Wilson hisses, “Just read the allocution, already!”

Judge Hammersmith’s courtroom isn’t the oldest or the fanciest in the building—no, that extremely specific honor belongs to Judge Brassels, who somehow landed the old-timey courtroom on the first floor with the gleaming brown wood and the murals—but it’s still pretty intimidating. In addition to important felony criminal cases, Judge Hammersmith handles a whole lot of civil matters, and you can tell that the room’s built for sparkly-shiny presentations. There’s a big-screen TV hanging on the wall opposite from the jury box, there’s one of those document projector things tethered to what looks like a second witness box, there’s microphones hanging from the ceiling, you name it. Wade’s first-ever CLE (on the riveting topic of opening statements for criminal defense attorneys, believe it or not) bored him to tears in this very courtroom. Seriously, the only saving grace was that all the seats in the gallery were super comfortable.

He wishes he was in the gallery right now, instead of standing next to his client at the defense counsel table while the guy shakes like a particularly nervy leaf.

Across the well of the courtroom and seated at the prosecutor’s table, Maria Hill sighs quietly. She tries to hide it behind a carefully-curled fist that’s raised to her mouth, but Wade can tell these things. Her high-heeled shoe’s tapping an impatient, almost-silent rhythm against the tiled floor, too. He wonders whether she’s fighting against some sort of weird prosecutorial shame over having to dismiss the goat-sex charge. Either that, or she’s meant to handle one of the many (many) other hearings that’re on the docket for Judge Hammersmith’s courtroom.

No, listen, the docket sheet is literally the length of Wade’s forearm. He measured. And then, he’d smiled charmingly as strangers in suits frowned at the guy comparing his arm to the docket sheet hanging outside the courtroom, but hey. Whatever.

Beside Wade, Allan Crane—the particularly nervy leaf, remember—stares at the yellow sheet of paper in his hands. It’s a single paged ripped from a legal pad and covered in loopy, half-indecipherable handwriting. Allan and Wade had written it together over the course of three different attorney-client meetings, editing and re-editing the bits that Allan felt portrayed him in a negative light. Because, apparently, there’s a nice _clean_ way to plead guilty to smoking a lot of pot, drinking a lot of beer, and exposing yourself to a couple cops.

“Mister Crane?” Judge Hammersmith asks, peering over his glasses.

For lack of a better plan, Wade steps on Allan’s foot. _Lightly_ , but the guy still squeaks like one of those rubber steak chew toys you give to dogs. “S-sorry,” he mutters, swallowing thickly. “I just needed a second. I’m good now.”

“Go ahead, then,” the judge encourages, and miraculously, Allan actually starts reading.

Wade knows he should listen to Allan’s little recitation, but he’s spent enough time bent over his legal pad and perfecting this particular shit storm that his mind sort of starts to wander off. He glances again at Maria and her ever-tapping foot, and then at the TV screen that’s mounted to the wall. He can see a sort of distorted reflection of the courtroom in the black glass—lumpy shapes representing the jury box chairs and a hazy, unrecognizable version of the state seal, mostly—and he loses himself in that, tracing the shape of the world he already knows like he’s never actually seen it before.

Lately, his life’s felt like that, familiar and new all at the same time.

Oh, don’t get him wrong, which is probably pretty easy to do because he’s the worst storyteller in the history of the universe and whatever: it’s not like he’s traded in his existence for a newer, shinier model somehow. In fact, after drinking coffee with Darcy that one afternoon, he’d retreated home, turned off every light in his apartment, and crawled into his bed like some kind of lurking nocturnal beast. He’d stared at the wall and then the ceiling, tracing the flashes of headlights as cars pulled into the parking lot outside and trying, basically, to figure out how he’d created such a terrible mess of, you know, _everything_.

Turns out, it’d taken a lot more than one night of empty-headed wall-staring to sort out the jumbled mess of his life, and he’d spent the first two days after the coffee conversation in a sort of hollow haze. Granted, he’d shown up at work and actually done his job, locking himself in his office and finishing up the two motions to suppress that he’d abandoned in that dark time after the last fight with Darcy between client meetings and court dates. When it came to work, then, he’d basically transformed himself into the very model of a modern major mature adult, and took all of Carol’s snarking with an extra-chunky grain of salt even as the _rest_ of his existence felt like an unmitigated disaster.

(By the way, did you catch what he did there? No, seriously, reread that last sentence. It’s fucking brilliant, that rhyme.)

And then, finally, once the thick fog of shame started to fade—and trust him, his shame’d started out so damn dense you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face—he’d decided to apologize to everyone for his weeks of insanity, extra-scattered mannerisms, and the, you know, recent foray into vomit-centric sidewalk art. 

He’s still not sure what exactly spurred it on, though he’d outwardly blamed the first sunny day in weeks and the clean, fresh smell that followed a warm March drizzle. But what’d started as veering off into the grocery store’s floral department and buying Jessica Drew a cute little potted plant with a card that said _sorry I barfed all over your birthday party_ had turned into a whole step nine adventure into making amends. 

Because after the plant, he’d shoved a hefty gift certificate to a fancy restaurant into an expensive Hallmark card and paid a district attorney file clerk five bucks to drop it onto Clint’s desk up in the office. 

Then, with Emma’s reluctant help—because she’d stared at him like he’d grown three extra heads and transformed into a weird hydra of a man—he’d ordered a really nice shoe-cleaning kit online and shipped it to Carol’s home address.

Early Friday afternoon, he’d snuck out of work to drive down to The High Bar, where he handed the bartender his debit card and assumed responsibility for every snack and drink ordered by The Learned Hand Jobs that night. Not, of course, that he’d actually shown up to trivia, which maybe explained why the hundred-dollar charge surprised him so much.

Then, on Saturday night—just a couple nights ago, in case calendars are your mortal enemy or something—he’d shown up at the McCoy-hyphen-Drake residence with a bottle of wine and a mouth full of apologies. He’d really meant just to drop the bottle and run, but he’d ended up sticking around for another horrible meal. Like, seriously, Wade now officially suspects that Bobby’s stomach lining is made of lead and angel’s tears, because Hank’d managed to turn chicken into sandpaper and produce grainy mashed potations with tasteless gravy. 

But friendship, Wade’d decided, sort of beat out worse-than-mediocre food and all the creepy country kitsch in the kitchen. Plus, Bobby and Hank are also kind of lightweights in the booze department, meaning that splitting a bottle of wine let all three of them laugh until their faces and stomachs hurt. 

At Monday night’s muy thai—once all the _please forgive me_ gifts’d officially reached their owners and Wade’d finally shrugged off the feeling of all-encompassing, helpless guilt that’d turned him into an empty husk of a man—Clint’d eyed him curiously from across the mat. “Have you talked to Darcy?” he’d asked, still panting after a particularly sloppy round of sparring’d earned them the usual _guard up!_ admonishment.

“You do know how break-ups work, right?” Wade’d retorted. He’d taken advantage of the good weather over the weekend and had actually devoted some time to, you know, running, which left his legs pleasantly sore. Actually, _pleasantly sore_ felt like a good way to describe his life right then: tarnished and imperfect, but worth the little jabs of pain. 

Clint, supportive friend extraordinare, had rolled his eyes. “Don’t dodge the question.”

“I’m not dodging the question. I’m just saying that, based on my research, you’re not supposed to talk to your ex right away after she _becomes_ your ex.” He’d waved a hand. “Leads to, like, remorse sex followed promptly by ugly shouting.”

“Says who?” 

“Uh, like every ladies’ magazine in the country.” He’d watched as Clint pulled the world’s huffiest face. “Don’t you read _Cosmo_? Because if you don’t, well, I’m not going to necessarily say you need to get with the program or anything, but you might want to consider—”

In retrospect, Wade’d probably deserved the way Clint’d bum-rushed him in a flurry of blows that left him sprawled out on the mat like a half-dead salmon.

And he’d probably also deserved Clint asking about certain mountainous androids in the locker room, later, but Wade’s not touching that one with a ten foot pole.

“And all of these events happened in Suffolk County?” Judge Hammersmith asks, and Wade jerks out of his little mental meander in time to watch Allan lower his page of notes onto counsel table. The nervousness flies out of him like birds trying to escape a predator, and for the first time in the months that Wade’s served as his attorney, he looks like any other guy. Well, any other dreadlocked hipster in skinny jeans, but you’d be surprised how many of those exist out there in the world.

“Yes, sir,” Allan answers without missing a beat.

“Thank you,” the judge says. Allan starts to sit down, but Wade flutters his hands around until the guy recognizes that, no, you stand for the whole plea-entering process. Lucky for him, the judge’s flipping through his file and misses that particular comedy of errors. “And the state is moving to dismiss the second count of the first complaint, correct?” he asks Hill.

Hill snaps to her feet immediately. “Yes, your honor, and I believe that Mister Wilson and I will be filing a joint sentencing recommendation at some point in the next month.”

“Without the felony charge, I’d expect nothing less,” Hammersmith returns. He’s one of the oldest judges in the county—a couple years younger than Judge English, Wade thinks, though he’s pretty sure Judge English witnessed the launch of the _Mayflower_ —and he wears every year on his face. But his eyes remain razor-sharp and laser-accurate, and every ounce of that acuity immediately focuses is on Allan. Wade watches his client wet his lips, swallow, and then immediately wet his lips again. “Mister Crane, this court will accept your guilty pleas on all three charges, finding that they were voluntarily and knowingly entered. Hopefully, your counsel and the state can work out a reasonable recommended sentence and return you to your— What was it that you do, again?”

He pages through the file, and Allan’s ears flush pink. “I, uh, teach and perform non-traditional dance.”

Across the aisle, Hill dips her head to hide her tiny grin, but the judge just looks baffled. Wade wonders how many interpretive dancers rack up bestiality charges. He’s guessing it’s a very small number. “Yes, well,” Hammersmith replies, clearing his throat slightly. “I hope you can return to your teaching career soon. We’re adjourned.” 

The court security officer who’s spent the last half-hour lurking around in the back of the room—presumably to protect any barnyard animals from the so-called dangerous felon defendant—barks out that they should all rise, which is stupid since they’re all already standing. Wade shifts toward Allan, his mouth full of suggestions about their next client meeting and sentence recommendations, but he’s cut off by a pair of arms gripping him around the middle of his torso.

It takes him five entire seconds to realize that Allan Crane, twenty-four-year-old screw up and altogether pain in the ass, is hugging him. Like, physically pressing his body to Wade’s body and squeezing him until he can’t really breathe.

“I can’t really breathe,” he wheezes out once he realizes what’s happening, and Allan mutters an apology before releasing him. When he casts his eyes at the floor, all evidence of his shitty attitude and perpetual defensiveness drops away and, for the first time, Wade can see the _kid_ who lives underneath. Because although Wade’s muttered a lot of nasty names for this particular client under his breath, he’s never really stopped to think that maybe Allan’s his own kind of hot mess, too.

Maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled wasn’t convincing the world he didn’t exist, Wade reasons. Maybe his greatest trick was hiding the fact that literally everyone on the planet struggles with _something_.

“I’ll call you about our next meeting,” he promises, and actually pats Allan on the arm for a second before he starts to clean up his file. _Starts_ being the operative word, of course, because he ends up glancing over his shoulder and watching his client walk out of the courtroom.

He’s still watching, a little lost in his own brain, when Hill says, “We’ll need to schedule a time to talk about a recommended sentence.” She’s standing with her hip against the bar in the front of the gallery, her file slung under her arm. She’s draped in casual intimidation as much as a navy blue pant suit, and Wade feels the back of his mouth go dry. “I don’t want to lock him up as much as I want him to learn his lesson.”

“You and me both,” he immediately agrees. His tongue feels like it’s Velcroed to the roof of his mouth.

“And,” she adds, “I want this case off my desk.”

“Uh, no offense, but not nearly as much as I want it off _mine_ ,” he returns, and here’s a fun fact: Maria Hill is a whole lot less scary when you know how to make her laugh. 

She walks away after that, still chuckling, leaving Wade to clean up his own mess before he finally follows. Thanks to the miles-long docket sheet, the hallway outside Judge Hammersmith’s courtroom feels more like a July afternoon at the waterpark than, you know, the hallway outside of a courtroom. Instead, it’s freaking packed to the gills with people, almost all of them dressed in thoroughly impressive monkey suits—not _literal_ monkey suits, mind you, but the kind of really snazzy pant-and-jacket combos that totally deserve the title—and every last one of them totally oblivious to the world around them. Wade zigs and zags through the crowd, expertly dodging accidentally-thrown elbows and dangerously sharp-looking high-heeled shoes. 

Hey, he went to public school. You learn these things, okay?

Aside from the throngs of people who’d stopped by to rubberneck the Killgrave trial back in the fall, he’s pretty much never seen this many people milling around outside a courtroom—but then again, he’s not a civil attorney. Civil attorneys, he’s learned, travel in big packs like those things that trampled Mufasa. He suspects they’re maybe trying to strike fear into the hearts of their opponents in a sort of Sharks-versus-Jets way, but can you really scare someone with your unholy legion of lawyers when they _themselves_ have an unholy legion of lawyers? 

Question for the ages.

Anyway, point is, the hallway’s stupid-crowded with people Wade’s never seen before, and he’s forced to spend all his energy avoiding an awkward, file-dropping collision of death.

Which, of course, means that he ends up running right into some tall, broad-shouldered guy in a dark gray suit.

And, because god hates him, the guy he runs into is none other than Nate Summers.

Wade recognizes the victim of his sloppy side-step instantly, what with the shock of silver hair and the all-too-familiar whiff of spicy aftershave, and he briefly considers screaming _fire!_ and running in the opposite direction. After all, he’s avoided Nate for literally two weeks straight, slinking out of his office like there’s a predator lurking around every corner and watching the parking lot from his office to ensure that, yes, a certain dark sedan _has_ disappeared around the corner and driven off into the night. If ducking out of confrontation before the confrontation even happened was an Olympic sport, Wade’d be a goddamn gold medalist, that’s how great he is at hiding from one Nathan Fill-in-the-Blank Summers.

Except for right now, apparently. Because when Nate glances up from the file he’s reviewing and meets Wade’s eyes, Wade forgets how exactly his legs work. Either that, or they grow into the carpeting like roots, binding him to the spot.

Less than a foot away, Nate stills, too.

They watch one another, two heavy boulders in the sea of strangers, and Wade abandons all his fantasies of running away to memorize every detail of Nate’s expression. Except Wade knows from experience that you really can’t memorize something you already know like the back of your hand—especially when that proverbial “something” follows you around everywhere you go, haunting your days and plaguing your nights. Not that it stops his mind from tracing and retracing the fine lines around Nate’s eyes or the shape of the mouth that once kissed Wade into moans and then breathlessness. If anything, the memories intensify the whole thing. They definitely play tricks on his brain, because he swears Nate spends entire seconds staring at his mouth, and that makes absolutely no sense.

Wade swallows. He opens his mouth, but absolutely no sound crawls out.

His face must be pretty funny, because for some reason, the corners of Nate’s lips twitch into the faintest hint of a smile. It lights a fire in Wade’s belly, hot and unquenchable, and Wade curls his fingers tighter around his file. Yeah, because that’ll stop his heart from hammering like a bass drum.

“Wade,” Nate says quietly, and sweet mother of dragons, Wade’s never felt so overwhelmed at the sound of a human person using his Christian name. The bass drum picks up pace, and Wade swears that his whole body trembles. Two weeks of radio silence, he decides, are two weeks too many. 

He thinks maybe Nate agrees with that assessment, too, because the guy sweeps a pink tongue over his lower lip like he plans to keep talking. Wade draws in a sharp breath and immediately braces himself. Well, he more leans in with this uncontrollable nervous anticipation, but hey, _braces_ requires fewer words.

Nate exhales slowly, almost inaudibly, and then finally opens his mouth to speak.

“Apparently, the other side intends to present an oral motion this morning,” a female voice announces, and Nate immediately presses his lips closed again. Before Wade can really process what’s happened, Emma Frost materializes at Nate’s shoulder, her whole face creased into a truly apocalyptic frown. Not for the first time, Wade’s eternally grateful that she can’t kill people with her mind. “Six weeks since our last status conference, and they wait until today to— Oh. Wilson.”

“I’d be a little more offended that you just spat my name out like really goopy flavorless gum if you weren’t clearly in the middle of some big, you know, _thing_ ,” Wade informs her, gesturing to the well-dressed sardines all around them. His hand feels like it’s shaking, though, so he immediately curls it back around the edge of Allan’s file. He wonders if he can gesture with the file and hide his weird, Nate-related tremors. Probably not. 

For the first time in recorded history, Emma actually looks a little guilty for her acidic tone of voice. Even better, Nate smiles in a way that warms his face before he hides it behind a very dramatic fake cough. Emma sends him a warning look before she turns back to Wade. “We have a few clients who are going to be certified as part of a class action suit,” she informs him crisply. 

“Possibly certified,” Nate corrects.

“No, not _possibly_ ,” she snaps at him. “I haven’t spent the last three months arguing down the phone with Erik Lensherr for possible certification. Either we get certified, or we’re withdrawing, because I am _through_ —”

“Speaking of withdrawing, I should probably go,” Wade cuts in, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. Emma halts her tirade midstream, her perfectly pink lips pursing in what can only be frustration, but Wade hardly notices her. Oh, he should—that particular suit draws attention to exactly how far her legs stretch up into the stratosphere—but he, just like old times, ends up focusing in on Nate.

Nate, whose normally sharp eyes soften, and whose expression fills with this weird sort of listlessness that Wade can’t face. Nate, with square shoulders that drop a half-inch and big hands that flex against his own case file. Nate, who Wade suddenly misses like a limb.

The thick feeling in the back of Wade’s throat forces him to swallow, and Nate drops his attention back to his file.

Wade decides that now is an excellent opportunity to analyze the judicial complex’s flooring choices. It’s literally the ugliest carpet in the universe, both beige and blue at the same time, but on the plus side, Wade doesn’t feel like his heart’s been shoved into a vice when he stares at it. “I’ll, uh, see you guys back at the office,” he says limply. “Good luck on your complicated civil thing I will never understand, yeah?”

“Sure,” Emma replies, her voice full to bursting with confusion. It’s an improvement to her usual humorless drone, sure, but for some reason, Wade’s heart and gut ache even more because of it.

He beats a quick retreat after that, breaking away from the throng of people and disappearing down the hallway that leads to the back doors. He means to emerge into the March sunlight, charge down the stairs, and keep running, but something stops him just inside the glass doors. He stares out at the bright spring day until the glare from sunlight hitting car windshields hurts his eyes; when he closes them, the heaviness of his eyelids propels his head forward until he’s leaning against the glass. He stands there for a long time, his forehead soaking up the warmth from outside while the rest of his body suffers from that special hypothermia only a building with horrible climate control can provide, and tries to chase the image of Nate’s enigmatic smile from his mind.

He totally fails, mind you, but he _tries_.

It’s after he finally climbs into his car after haphazardly tossing his blazer and file in the back seat that his cell phone buzzes. He gropes into his pocket, totally convinced that Allan’s already started worrying about the sentencing phase of his adventures in misdemeanor crime.

He really should know better, by now. Because, the way his life works, a text from Allan would’ve just been way, _way_ too easy.

 **Nathan ________ Summers:** _I was glad to see you, you know._

He stares at the message for a long time, his thumbs sliding along the edges of the screen and his stomach twisting itself into uninvited knots.

 _i kno_ , he finally texts back, and then—because he’s clearly a well-adjusted functional adult—he shuts his phone off.

 

==

 

“I’m starting to take this whole ‘checking my phone ten times an hour while my slave labor sweats on my behalf’ thing pretty personally, you know.”

Across the living room, Clint throws up the middle finger of his left hand while still thumbing out a text with his right. Actually, it’s pretty impressive how well the guy can multitask, since he’s also holding a roll of packing tape between his teeth and a box of packing paper under his arm. He’s like a differently-abled octopus, Wade decides, and adjusting to the amputation of his six other arms incredibly well.

He’s still typing when Natasha emerges from the bedroom with a garbage bag. Although she’s twisted most her hair up and out of the way, a couple loose curls hang in her face. They’re not quite clinging to her skin—it’s warm out today, sure, but not humid enough to sauté them all in sweat—but she tucks them back behind her ear anyway. “I cannot believe how many condom wrappers were under your bed,” she declares. When Clint smirks, she swings the bag at him. “I’m going to need therapy.”

“Hey, the guy’s just observing the cardinal rule,” Wade points out. He’s on bookshelf duty, which requires sorting through a shit ton of battered old paperbacks and packing them into appropriately-sized boxes. He’s willing to bet money that Coulson already owns most of them, but Clint’d just muttered something about sentimental value and resumed unplugging all his electronics.

Natasha frowns suspiciously. “What rule?” 

“No glove, no lo— Ow! God, what, is that filled with batteries or something?” He barely manages to duck a second swing of the garbage bag, and then finds himself under the immediately scrutiny of Natasha’s terrifying glare. Now that he thinks about it, she’s probably measuring out a third, more menacing swing. He rubs the sore spot on his shoulder. “On second thought, don’t tell me whether there’re batteries in there. Because if there are, then I’ll have to ask about why Clint keeps batteries in his bedroom, and that will lead all of us down a very dark tunnel.”

Natasha raises one perfect eyebrow and then, very slowly, glances over at Clint. Clint, who’s apparently finished his text message and returned his phone to his pocket, shrugs at her.

“That’s what she said,” they inform him in perfect union, and Wade groans at them. Not just because he’s a little horrified, either, but also because how the _hell_ did he miss that joke?

He almost asks that very question aloud, too, but then Natasha swings the bag of debauchery onto the wonderfully-scented couch (which will, Clint’s assured everyone, be residing in his and Phil’s home office from here until eternity). She rests her hands on her hips. “I need to disinfect every inch of my body,” she decides.

“You date somebody who routinely cleans up after Stark,” Clint points out. She huffs at him, but Wade knows from the way she rolls her eyes that she’s silently conceding that particular argument. You can just tell, you know? “Besides, if you don’t help me clean this place out, who will?”

“Uh, your boyfriend?” Wade suggests. He gestures with the books in his hands. Heavy paperback books, the kind that’d make pretty respectable doorstops. Somebody needs to suggest that the soon-to-be Barton-Coulson household invest in a couple Kindle Paperwhites. “You know the one: receding hairline, fondness for suits, weirdly-hot? Probably capable of lifting heavy boxes of law books?”

Clint lets out a derisive little snorting sound. “And like I said yesterday, he’s cleaning out his place so everything’ll fit.” Just behind him, Natasha mouths those exact same words in perfect harmony, and Wade bites the inside of his mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. Laughing might get him extra crispy murdered, after all. Clint narrows his eyes anyway. On principle, Wade guesses. “Besides,” he adds, half-shrugging in his too tight t-shirt, “he and Maria split the phone tree.”

“Phone tree?” Wade immediately asks, but he blurts it at the same time that Natasha chimes in with, “No news?” He figures that, in a battle to the voice-death, he might as well just let her win, especially since her voice is firmer and she’s clearly capable of much violence.

Clint shakes his head. “No. Last Da—” Whether he intentionally glances in Wade’s direction, Wade himself’ll never know, but the half-second of eye contact results in a truly apocalyptic frown. Seriously, his face-crease brings all the doom to the yard. “Last anybody knew, she was only at seven centimeters.”

“Seven centimeters is actually a lot,” Natasha observes.

“Who’s at seven centimeters and why is that—which, if my math is right, is like three inches _max_ —suddenly a lot of something?” And before you accuse Wade of being nosy, he’s standing _right_ there. In a sweaty t-shirt and bike shorts that cling in all the wrong places. He’s all for secrets, but not when he’s in the room.

“Jane,” Natasha says in a tone that heavily implies a sigh, “went into labor at one this morning.”

Wade kind of opens his mouth to reply, but realizes as soon as his tongue’s pressed to the insides of his teeth that he’s not really sure what he should _say_. After all, the words that rise to his lips like a knee-jerk reflex—namely “Huh, Darcy didn’t say anything about that”—are dumber than Jim Carrey’s character in that one really awful 90s movie. Of course Darcy didn’t tell him anything about it, because he and Darcy are still studiously refusing to speak to one another. 

It’s not a normal kind of not-speaking, either, but the Ultra Deluxe Teenage Breakup Package, the one where they’ve each set their gchat so that they’re hidden and where Wade immediately closes out of Facebook whenever he notices that Darcy’s popped on. He remembers the same dance with Sammie, back in the halcyon days of AOL instant messenger and free internet bulletin boards. Except with Sammie, he’d been a skinny, awkward, weird-ass kid, not an ostensibly functional, degree-holding, law-licensed adult.

But it feels too soon to gather up all the charred pieces of wood and rebuild a bridge over troubled waters. Especially since, truth be told, he still feels like he’s in pieces, too.

Life, he decides, is stupid-weird.

But since Natasha and Clint are both staring at him with these totally transparent expressions of blind worry, he forces a huge grin. “Good for her,” he replies. “Hopefully the kid waits until it’s out of the womb to grow Thor-style shoulders, or otherwise—”

He fakes a shudder and returns to packing.

The dynamic duo watch him for a couple more seconds before returning to their previous bicker-fight, arguing about Clint’s inability to keep a clean house and how Coulson’s not bothered “as long as he’s reaping the benefits.” (Ew.) After long enough, though, the architects of Project Move Clint’s House lapse back into silence. Wade tunnel-visions the task at hand, narrowing his understanding of the universe until all he’s aware of is the weight of paperbacks in his grip and how they sound when they hit the bottom of the moving box.

He’s reaching for the packing tape when Clint says, “She’ll get over it.”

Wade closes his hand around the stupid plastic thing that both holds and cuts the tape—whoever designed that contraption is an evil genius—but he definitely doesn’t raise his head. Instead, he tries to come up with a way to say _I don’t know what you’re talking about_ without sounding like an idiot, a liar, or both.

He abandons all hope about twenty seconds in. “You sure about that?”

“She’s hurt, not heartless,” Clint replies, and Wade grips the tape harder. “She understands why you two went your separate ways, even if she won’t admit it. And I think, once she sees you’re happy with Nate, she’ll be able to get there.”

That last sentence punches Wade in the gut so hard, he really thinks he might throw up. It takes a couple thick swallows and a funny little cough before he can breathe again. Clint’s eyes try very studiously to burn a hole in the side of his skull. You know, like normal. “I’d kind of have to be with the guy for her to see that,” he points out limply.

When he finally risks a half-second glance out of the very corner of his eye, Clint’s staring at him. “The hell do you mean you’re _not_ with him?” he demands, and Wade picks up the tape so he can start sealing the box. He hopes the sticky squealing sound’ll drown out Clint’s voice, but it only encourages him to talk louder. “You broke up with Darcy for him.”

“No,” Wade replies sharply, and he jerks the tape thing so hard that he drags an extra two feet off the roll. He tries to cut it, fails, and—once the tape twists and sticks to itself—abandons the whole thing. “I broke up with Darcy because I shouldn’t’ve been dating Darcy in the first place. Because empty reasons aren’t good enough reasons to throw yourself at someone and then _hurt_ that someone, too.” Clint stares at him, a little slack-jawed, so he drags his fingers through his hair. He’s a tiny bit sweaty and definitely not his best self. He wishes he could just make out like a normal person—or a Clint Barton—and strip off his t-shirt. “It wasn’t Nate.”

“But?” Clint asks, and Wade hates him in that instant. Because for some reason, Clint is the only person in the world who possesses the uncanny and totally weird ability to peer right through every convenient lie Wade lobs in his direction. Like he’s got super x-ray vision that can peel back layers of skin and see his twisting guts and hammering heart. 

He drops his hand to his side and sort of just shakes his head, a little cobweb-clearing gesture that only makes him feel foggier. He can hear the vacuum cleaner buzzing in the bedroom, and he tries to distract himself by thinking of Natasha running it, her curls bobbing. Somehow, though, he ends up wondering other things.

Like how Nate’s spending his Saturday afternoon, and whether he feels the brand of Wade’s hands on his skin the way Wade feels Nate’s.

“I don’t want something that’s a fucked-up mess,” he says. The words tumble out like a reflex, involuntary noise he can’t really control. Sympathy floods Clint’s expression, and instead of frustrating, Wade finds it suddenly kind. Too kind, the sort of kindness he definitely doesn’t deserve. It wells up in his belly, and when he swallows, it’s not out of nerves as much as it’s out of emotions. “I wanted this before Darcy, I’m gonna want it after, but I don’t— I fuck everything else up without even trying, and I know if I do it to this, too, I won’t come back from it.”

“Yeah,” Clint replies, not with immediacy so much as with the full-body conviction that only Clint Barton can really pull off, “but you won’t fuck it up.”

Wade snorts. “And you know that how, exactly? Special soothsaying sex with the King of Condom Wrappers?”

He expects some sort of joke or the snort of a laugh, but Clint just shakes his head. “I know because I know _you_ ,” he says simply. “And if you work even half as hard to hold onto Nate as you do to hold onto your friends, there’s no way that he won’t know it, too.”

Clint’s words circle through Wade’s consciousness like a broken record for the rest of the day, rearing their ugly heads—or whatever words have in lieu of heads, since this isn’t exactly Sesame Street in the Land of Anthropomorphic Everything—every time his mind starts to wander. They repeat themselves in a murmur as he loads up his Metro and drives it to Coulson’s house, in a shout as he helps Clint and Phil manhandle the couch to a different wall in the living room, and in a tiny, hopeful whisper as he, Natasha, Clint, and Phil all sit down to eat post-packing pizza together on Phil’s back patio. Drowning them out with the radio on the drive home means singling them to the tune of “Your Love is My Drug” by Ke$ha, and melting them out of his brain with hot shower water only leaves him feeling damp and cold.

And that night, he lies in bed with his phone on his stomach for a very long time, staring at nothing and listening to the ghost of Clint’s voice.

He’s half-awake, ready to drift entirely out of this reality and into dreamland, when he finally picks up his phone and fumbles through a message. 

**Me:** _u evr wondr how life gts all fuked up_

Somehow, he’s not surprised when the reply rumbles through all of ten seconds later.

 **Nathan ________ Summers:** _Life being messy is always a given. Usually, I just wonder how to find the diamond in that day’s particular rough._

Wade rolls his eyes and snorts at the answer. It’s obviously a stock reply, like the one-liners from customer-service chat robots. He jabs his thumbs hard into the keyboard and replies, _yeh and hows that goin 4 u_. 

Bitterly, be the way. Like, if text-messaged words could spew acid, these’d burn through Nate’s screen or whatever. 

He watches as the screen dims and then darkens, and still waits a full five minutes more before shoving his phone onto the bedside table and pulling the covers up to his chin. He cocoons himself in them, which is kind of an apt metaphor if you think about it. Who in this entire screwed-up cast of characters besides him qualifies as an ugly fucker on the outside with a secret heart of gold?

No, not Clint. Clint’s actually attractive. And seriously, if you just thought of Laufeyson, Wade will personally smack you upside the head.

He’s thinking about Laufeyson as a really ugly green caterpillar when his phone buzzes. It scares the shit out of him, jolting him so hard that he nearly falls out of bed. He gropes around for it, knocks it onto the floor, and has to drag it back up to his face by the cord.

The light hurts his eyes in the dark, but somehow, the words hurt his heart even worse.

Because Nate’s response reads, _I think, for once, I let caution get the better of me._

Wade stares at his message, tracing and retracing it a hundred times while Clint’s words repeat themselves in the back of his head.

And the next morning, he wakes up with a charging cord wrapped around his wrist and the phone still in his hand.

 

==

 

“Oh my god,” Carol announces, spiking her plastic grocery store sack onto the break room like it’s a football after a touchdown, “they are driving me literally insane!”

Bobby lowers his hands—hey, a guy’s got to protect his face from the vengeful wrath of a shrink-wrapped sandwich, an apple, and one of those single-serve Pringle cups—and reveals shitty little smile. “You’re starting to sound like Wade.”

Carol drops into her chair and levels a glare across the table. “I will murder you where you sit, Drake.”

“You both, uh, know I’m in the room, right?” Wade asks, and she snorts at him before reaching for the television remote. 

Bobby, on the other hand, snickers into his pre-made tuna salad with crunchy crackers and tries not to end up on the wrong end of Carol’s threats of violence. They’re gathered around the conference room table, just the three of them, their lunches spread out in front of them and the television interrupting their regularly scheduled programming to bring them some irrelevant update to a city council election. (Seriously, it’s irrelevant, never to be seen in the continuity of this story again.) Bobby’s wearing an awful checkered shirt with his sleeves rolled up, Carol’s clingy blouse sticks and shimmers in all the right places, and Wade’s pants—a brand new purchase from the thrift store’s Brown Bag Sale—actually fit properly. Really, it’s just another manic Thursday at Suffolk County Legal Aid, and yes, Wade knows that the song’s technically reserved for Mondays, but there’re no good songs about Thursday. 

Better yet, Bobby’d invited Nate to eat with them and Nate’d answered with a tiny smile and—

“Who the hell does he think he’s fooling with the _maybe next time_ , anyway?” a voice that definitely does _not_ belong to Nate demands, and Wade jerks his head up from his Campbell’s Soup-on-Hand to watch Carol rip the plastic wrap off her sandwich. No, really, she _rips_ it, breaking it open with her nails and then pulling it apart when just unfolding the seams would probably be a lot easier. Bobby stops spreading tuna on a cracker to frown at her. “I’m no expert on emotionally-constipated men—”

“You sure about that?” Wade interrupts, and then shifts his legs so she can’t kick him under the table.

“—but I’m pretty sure that whole exchange can be translated to _it hurts my broken heart to look in Wade’s direction._ ” Wade decides to apply his years of amateur dramatics to the situation by tossing his head and rolling his eyes all at once, but when he settles down again, Carol’s staring at him. Actually, _glaring_ might be the better choice of adjective, what with the steel-set jaw and the narrow, kill-you-in-your-sleep eyes. He picks up and sips his soup for, you know, fortification and protection. “You need to fix this before the pining suffocates all of us.”

“Like carbon monoxide,” Bobby chimes in, and Carol sends him a look like he might actually be from another planet.

Wade tries to take shameless advantage of her distraction by reaching for the remote—because if he flips to their show and starts filling in the dialogue, he figures he’ll save himself from a fate worse than death or whatever—but Carol catches him by the wrist and slaps his hand. Hard, too, because he swears as he jerks back out of her grip. 

“Talk to Nate,” she spits.

“Is your palm lead-coated?” Wade returns, rubbing the back of his hand. She narrows her eyes. “Seriously, you could’ve broken one of my many fine hand-bones, slapping me like that with your meaty man-palm.”

He expects her to sneer at him, but she just narrows her eyes. “Talk to Nate.”

“Our resident attorney for the old and infirm could help me sue you for civil battery, you kn—”

“God, Wade, just _talk_ to him!” the resident attorney for the old and infirm interrupts. He sets down his can of appropriately diet soda with a loud clunk. Wade’s grown accustomed to Bobby’s (perpetually constipated) face, but his tight, serious voice is a whole other ballgame. He’s reminded of the Bobby with the Taser and then cringes appropriately. “You keep running circles around each other, you’ll miss your chance, and I don’t want to see what you’re like _then_.”

Wade’s not sure he likes the twist at the end of Bobby’s comment or the edge to his tone, so he makes like a pair of dice and rolls his snake eyes. No? Okay, then he just rolls his normal eyes. “Because you, king of the young marrieds, is really an expert in relationships.”

“I might not be,” Bobby returns, “but I’m not an idiot, either. You can’t tip-toe through life barely talking to him, Wade. Whatever number you two did on one another’s not worth the kid gloves.” He pauses to pick at one of his crackers. “You could at least go back to being friends.”

He falls quiet after that, and Wade ends up playing with the lip on his soup’s little lid. Bobby’s right about him and Nate half-talking to each other. They exchange snarky e-mail forwards during the day, now, and occasional texts in the dark of night, but neither thing really constitutes actual friendship. Wade thinks about that every night, once the 160-character puns and bickering retorts lapse into silence. Talking to Nate again and slowly climbing uphill, it’s not _great_.

It’s not what they used to be, or what they almost became.

And it’s definitely not the ghost of Nate’s thumb against the corner of his mouth in the parking lot, the promise of something warm and real.

“We weren’t really friends at the time,” Wade admits, and he listens to the sound of Carol flicking the television off. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s served as the center of her attention, and it’s honestly a little unnerving. At least, he assumes. He’s still staring at his soup. “I mean, sure, things were better than when we used to barely look at one another and he rolled my eyes at every third sentence that dropped out of my mouth, yeah, but we weren’t real _friends_. He didn’t like me, I didn’t really like him, and all that unresolved sexual tension I’m sure you’re going to now complain about was really just unresolved normal tension, nothing special.” When he finally lifts his eyes for a half-second, they’re both gaping at him. Like, literal gaping, with Carol’s lips forming an _O_ and Bobby blinking his freakishly long lashes. Wade frowns at the both of them. “What?”

“Seriously?” Carol replies. It’s less a question and more a verbal whip-crack accompanied by the world’s most untrusting half-glare. “You think you two weren’t friends before this disgusting angst-athon started?”

“You didn’t even know that word before you met me,” Wade points out.

She dismisses the distraction with a quick flick of her wrist. It’s efficient. Wade’s never met an executioner, but he feels they’d dispatch humans with the same quick-like-a-bunny efficiency. “There’s no way that two people who bicker as much as you two aren’t at _least_ friends.”

“And don’t forget the weird name game,” Bobby offers, holding up a finger. Wade considers lopping that finger off with a butter knife.

Before his fantasy expanded to one where he exacted revenge on all his enemies using only his wits and a butter knife, however, Carol snaps her fingers. “The way they head straight toward each other at events,” she adds. “Like twisted co-dependent magnetism.”

Bobby nods. “The chicken nugget mountain when they worked on the forms.

“The reply-all arguments about comma splices over e-mail.”

“The way they never let anybody else voice the star-crossed lovers on the soap opera.”

“How Nate never snatches the last can of soda from the break room fridge, because he knows _somebody_ is too damn cheap to buy his—”

“Okay, yeah, so what?” Wade cuts in, his voice cracking like an egg somebody dropped on the kitchen floor. Bobby drops his still-raised finger to the tabletop and pokes at his tuna, but Carol—because she’s Carol Danvers, the duchess of dickery—just closes her mouth. Slowly, too, like she’s expecting Wade to experience a Greg House brand epiphany right there at the conference room table. Except he’s not a doctor, it’s never lupus, and his problem’s incapable of being solved in forty-four minutes.

He rubs a hand over his face.

“We had some fun,” he says after a couple seconds, because they’re both still staring at him and, as a rule, ants under a magnifying glass squirm a little before they fry. He twists his fingers in his hair for a second, then releases. “We spent a couple weeks or months not at each other’s throat. Great. That’s not holding hands and singing campfire songs. I can’t— I _don’t_ expect to be able to build that up into something else. Not right away.” He looks across the table at Carol and her all-seeing eyes. They’re the eyes of a predatory bird, and they definitely do not blink away. “We’re starting fresh, I guess,” he says after a couple more seconds. “And if that ends up a friendship, or something else, then hey. Good for us.”

Carol sighs and leans forward on the table, her arms stretching out and her long fingers curling together. “I know you think that’s true,” she says quietly, her voice uncharacteristically kind. Not to imply that she’s normally unkind, but— Well, she’s Carol Danvers, you do the math. “Hell, I even believe that you’ve shoved it so far into that messed up brain of yours that you actually believe that whatever spat’s come between you and the man-mountain is some kind of total reboot.” He cups his hands around his soup canister, but it’s now only lukewarm. “But you know what else I know?”

“If I say yes, can I avoid the rest of this conversation?”

“No,” she _and_ Bobby answer in unison.

“Then, no,” Wade replies, shaking his head. He wants to roll his eyes, but he feels like somebody’s sucked all the fight out of him. Truth be told, he’s felt that way for a long damn time. “But because this is the unsolicited advice hour, I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

He expects Carol to sneer at him, but for some completely unexpected and probably insane reason, she smiles. It’s a slow, easy smile, the kind that stretches out like taffy and immediately puts Wade’s nerves on edge. He’s never seen Carol smile that way before, and it definitely doesn’t suit her face.

He’s about to point out that very thing when the placidity breaks and Carol finally says, “I know that for two guys who pretend not to like each other very much, you always find ways of stumbling back together.”

The sentence slams into the softest part of Wade’s belly like a battering ram, and his fingers clamp around his stupid little plastic soup _thing_ as he exhales in a rush. He wonders if this is what a religious revelation feels like, breathtaking and overwhelming all at once.

Because in that instant, he knows she’s right. She’s right, Bobby’s right, Clint and Natasha are right, and even—as much as it pains him to admit it—Phil Coulson is right. All the hammers slam all the nails on their heads, the tail’s pinned on the donkey, and the needle in the haystack finally appears.

His brain cycles back to what feels like the start, Nate’s obnoxious commentary on relationships ringing in his ears like all the bells of Notre Dame.

And then, after the din fades into silence, he remembers Nate’s ice-blue eyes when he murmured, _Saying something is not the same as meaning it._

When his mind finally grinds to its usual stuttering halt, Bobby and Carol are both watching him carefully. He wets his lips, just once, and discovers for what feels like the first time that all his body parts still work.

“For the record,” he says, “we might keep stumbling together because I have absolutely no coordination.”

Across the table, the corner of Bobby’s mouth twitches. “I’ve seen you dance to ABBA in your office,” he notes, and Wade can’t help but snort a little laugh. “You’re coordinated enough.”

 

==

 

“You picked a miserable day for coffee,” Nate Summers comments as he shakes his umbrella out under the relative safety of the green Starbucks awning.

“I decided to aim for ‘authentic Seattle,’ since we’re sipping from the mermaid’s tit and all,” Wade replies, and he double-checks to make sure that, yes, that tiny curve to Nate’s lower lip _is_ his version of a smile.

The rain on the awning above them sounds a little bit like the drum part of a drum and bugle corps, but Wade stops listening around the time Nate reaches out, opens the door, and holds it for him. Something anxious and immature closes its fist around his belly, and he nods his thanks before stepping inside. He’s soaked almost to the bone—even really thick hoodies are no match for pouring March rain, never mind the sorry state of his knock-off converse shoes—but he’s pretty sure the shiver originated somewhere else.

He starts to shuck his hoodie, realizes that the shirt he picked out is damp enough that its almost translucent, and votes to keep the hoodie on. Even though the little flowers on said shirt ( _not_ a Goodwill special, thank you very much) are kind of fun and not at all girly.

At least, he hopes.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and waits for Nate.

He’d tried to ignore the Suffolk County Legal Aid Unsolicited Advice Family Fun Hour (patent pending) for as long as humanly possible, resuming first his life of successful legal expertise and then his life of snide late-night text messages sent to one Nathan Sarcastisaurus Summers. He’d defended a bench trial on afternoon Thursday, attended a suspiciously Darcy-free evening of trivia on Friday (“She said something about babies and cuddles,” Sam’d explained, shrugging), and went on a Saturday morning run with Clint. But the entire time, his scumbag brain rebelled on him, throwing out memories of chicken nuggets and carne asada burritos when he literally and figuratively least expected it.

Including during a particularly rigorous afternoon of— Well, this story is rated for teen audiences. Let’s just say that it involved Kleenex-brand facial tissue, a bottle of unscented hand lotion, and the internet. And no, he hadn’t stopped because of his scumbag brain. He’d invested good money in his, uhm, cinematic masterpiece of choice.

Right.

Long story short, he’d tossed Ezio into a haystack in the middle of his Saturday night replay of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and picked up his cell phone. The last text conversation’d consisted mostly of him and Clint bickering over whether to run at the park or the lake, and he reread it a couple times before backing out of that message stream and opening another.

 _hve coffe w me tmrow_ , he’d typed after several minutes of painful self-doubt. No, really, his stomach’d hurt the whole time. Worse, his hands’d shaken like the last fall leaves on the bough, resulting in some pretty epic spelling errors. More epic than usual, even.

He’d waited for an answer for a long time, long enough that his phone screen dimmed _and_ his television went from its usual full-screen glory to the bouncing, miniaturized display. Throwing his phone back onto the couch and unpausing the game did nothing to improve his mood, either. Apparently, Bobby and Carol each needed a refresher course on the difference between friendship, almost-friendship, and nothing-at-all-ship.

He was halfway up a freaking enormous tower when a response chimed through, and yeah, he’ll admit it: he let Ezio plunge to his middle-aged Italian death so he could fumble for the damn thing.

 **Nathan ________ Summers:** _The Starbucks on 7th Street at 10 a.m.? Presuming, of course, your message translates to “have coffee with me tomorrow.” I’m never quite sure._

Wade’d sworn in that moment that his heart’d started trying to hammer its way out of his fucking chest. _prsume all u want bigboy_ , he’d replied before altogether abandoning the game to find something clean to wear.

He’d chosen the now-damp flowered button-down and a pair of not-destroyed jeans. Not that either thing really matters when his heart is threatening to break his ribs, rip through his skin, tear through all his layers of clothes, and throw itself at Nate.

Nate, who strips off his jacket to reveal a tight button-down shirt of his own, one where the collar’s loose enough to show off his neck but the shoulders are tight enough to drive Wade to distraction. He forgets that they’re in public or that this is his attempt to turn uncomfortable, heavy silence into the sort of, well, _something_ , really, and just gapes at the guy.

Open-mouthed and everything, because he’s the classiest and also, because Nate cannot possibly be a real human being.

As it stands, the unreal creature in question lifts a curious eyebrow before he tosses his wet jacket over the back of a chair. “What?” he asks, because Wade’s jaw muscles are currently forming a Summers-related picket line and refusing to work.

“I’m just trying to figure out how you’re a real human being,” Wade answers, and for the first time in what feels like actual weeks, Nate’s eyes crinkle at him when he smiles.

Oh, not a full-blown smile. Wade knows from experience that a full-on Nate smile must be earned through hard work, dedication, and bribery, but the combo platter of a lip-twitch and an eye-crinkle means he’s firmly on the right track. He suddenly can’t remember the last time Nate offered him even that level of familiarity—the secretive half-smile, reserved only for very special occasions—but it feels like forever.

He hates that he can’t remember. He also hates that it feels like someone’s stuck a stone in the middle of his chest.

“Are we going to order a coffee, or was this a ruse to test my humanity?” Nate asks dryly.

“Depends on whether I can pinch some part of you to make sure I’m not dreaming,” Wade returns, and Nate snorts at him as he heads for the line.

The Sunday morning Starbucks crowd consists of two distinct subsets of people: bored-looking college-aged people in hip jeans and hipper glasses, and bustling couples and families in their Sunday best. Two antsy elementary-aged kids weave in at out of the line as their khaki-wearing mother orders herself a latte and apologizes profusely for their behavior. “They apparently had cake at Sunday school,” she explains with a tight smile.

Nate chuckles. “You should see my daughter after a bag of M&Ms.”

“Or a hot chocolate,” Wade chimes in without really thinking. “At least, restaurant hot chocolate with all the whipped cream and sprinkles on top.” 

The woman stops rooting through her clutch for perfect change and glances between them for a moment. Wade’s not exactly standing next to Nate as much as at his shoulder, his hands still shoved deep in his hoodie pockets and his weight mostly on the balls of his feet because he’s feeling extra tasty crispy nervy. He’s too busy thinking about that to really process the way the woman’s lips purse in consideration, and by that point, it’s _way_ too late.

The little boy bumps into him and almost knocks him into Nate. He swears to god—which he’s allowed to do, because it’s Sunday—that his life is a bad Sandra Bullock romantic comedy. Still, the woman’s mouth can’t seem to decide on an expression. It leaves Wade no choice but to do what he’s best at.

Oh, come on, you _know_ what he’s best at.

“Not like that,” he informs the stranger, his hands shooting out of his pockets at record speed and dancing around in front of him like he’s an apprentice air traffic controller. “I mean, yeah, _like that_ in the sense that I was directly involved in the purchase and consumption of restaurant hot chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles, but _not_ like that in the sense that the daughter in question is—”

“Eight,” Nate says, and Wade’s whole sputtering tirade shrieks to a violent halt. He thinks for a second that Nate’s trying to cut him off—after all, the number in question sort of works with his whole rambling explanation—but then, the guy decides to keep talking. “Nine in May, actually,” he continues, and Wade realizes that, somewhere in the midst of his distraction, the woman asked Hope’s age.

Nodding, the woman flicks her eyes to where her daughter is trying to stack the canned Refresher drinks into a lopsided pyramid. “Hopefully I’ll let mine survive to that age,” she replies, and for a very brief second, Wade’s absolutely terrified of her.

He watches as she gathers up her kids and drink, corralling them off to destinations unknown, and then turns to Nate. He’s tucking his change into his wallet like the previous conversation never happened. Wade even suspects he’s humming to himself a little. Granted, the Cobie Callait song on this month’s Starbucks mix CD is amazing, but _still_. “You know you just let me imply to a stranger that you’re a godless sodomite,” he blurts, because— Well, he sort of just did imply that very thing.

Nate glances over his shoulder. “I’m sure you’re very upset by this,” he replies, and then steps away to let Wade order his own coffee. 

He means to watch the barista make his order—a massive Americano with lots of room for milk, thanks—but before he knows it, his attention drifts across the shop to the table Nate’d claimed for them when they walked in. His big hands rest on the table, the cup nestled between them, and he looks out at the rain with a sort of practiced disinterest. Or, rather, he looks out at the rain with the sort of expression you’d mistake for practiced disinterest if you only knew him as _that guy sitting in the Starbucks on a Sunday morning in March_. If you happened to be someone else—Wade, for instance, though he supposes other people might contain the same sort of intimate knowledge in their heart-of-hearts (well, theoretically)—you’d recognize the expression as a thoughtful one.

Like the guy maybe lost part of himself in the rain and is still trying to find it.

Wade dumps some milk into his coffee, decides stirring it’s a waste of time, and treks a squelching, sodden-shoed beeline toward the table by the window.

“I’m a fucking idiot,” he says before his ass even hits the chair, and Nate jerks his head away from the window. For a second, Wade wonders if Nate even heard him coming; then, his mouth keeps moving, and Nate’s state of mind becomes totally irrelevant. “Like, I mean, I never claimed to be a regular brain trust, and I’m definitely not Robert Magna Cum Laude Drake or whatever, but for the first time in my life, I’m aware that I’m a complete and total numbskull and deserve everything I’ve gotten.” He only realizes that he’s actually in the chair—all the way seated—when he abandons his cup on the table to gesture with his hands. “It might even be irredeemable. I should call my healthcare provider and see if there’s some sort of test for this, because I might actually be so totally and irrevocably _stupid_ that—”

“Wade,” Nate says, and Wade’s jaw snaps shut like it’s on some sort of time-delay spring. His name always sounds different when it rolls from Nate’s mouth—softer and harder at the same time, full of promise more than frustration—and when their eyes meet, he realizes why. Other people look at him like he’s an alien being, a weird, mouthy, uncontrollable creature that crawled out of the primordial ooze and never evolved past rambling helplessness. 

Nate, on the other hand, looks at him like he’s a whole person, and says his name like he _matters_.

He wonders how he never noticed that before.

He also swallows, because there’s a lump rising in his throat that he definitely did _not_ invite to the current party. “I’m a dumbass,” he says, but more quietly this time.

Nate snorts softly, the sound not all that far from a laugh. “No more than I am,” he admits, and sips his drink. 

Wade expects some sort of follow-up once the guy’s set his cup down again, some sharp-tongued comment about the source of their shared stupidity, but instead, he falls quiet. They both do, really, the rain falling steadily on the other side of the window and the baristas chatting as they fill the next couple orders. Wade tries to pay attention to these sounds and then, to a dozen others—the muted hum of whatever music the girl who’s reading at the next table is listening to, the splash of cars as they rush through a puddle, the steady clacking of keys on a nearby laptop—but his attention returns incessantly to Nate. Like magnetism, he thinks as he studies the shape of Nate’s fingers and the slow cadence of his breath. Like there’s an invisible thread tying them together.

Or maybe not a thread so much as an electric current, one that sweeps through each of them and makes Wade’s foot jump under the table. He feels the buzz in his veins and the back of his teeth, as steady and constant as a rolling tide, and for the first time in the last couple months, he knows for an absolute fact that he can’t stop it.

He also knows that he has exactly zero interest in stopping it, which is a whole different kind of feeling.

“Look,” he says finally, after the silence’s stretched to its very limits and right around the time his fingers start dancing against the side of his cup, “I know I maybe blew this—thing between us. I don’t know, call it the elephant in the room, or the ghost in the shell. Whatever.” Nate’s lips roll when he glances away from the window and carefully meets Wade’s eyes, but not in a smile. If anything, they press together nervously, a tic that Wade’s never seen before. For some reason, it spurs him on. “And I know that, based on all that blowing-it I did, I definitely don’t deserve what really amounts to a second chance.”

Nate’s eyes glint at him like sunlight reflected off a glacier, ice-blue and almost too brilliant. They stare at one another, both of them stock-still and neither of them really breathing, until he says, “You don’t need to ask for a second chance.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’d like one anyway,” Wade replies as his lungs unclench. He runs his fingers through his hair, ignoring how they feel shaky and detached from the rest of his body, but the tension in his belly refuses to uncoil. To quote the chick from that musical about marriage and divorce, he stands on the precipice and struggles to keep his balance while he opens himself stitch by stitch. 

At least, he thinks that’s how the song goes. And you know what, even if that’s not how the lyrics go, it’s _definitely_ how this moment feels.

“I,” he starts to say, but whatever words he originally picked out stick in the back of his throat. He swallows around them. “I’m fucked up, Nate. Like, _super_ fucked up.”

For some reason, it’s that sentence—that rushed bolt of word vomit—that causes the corners of Nate’s eyes to crinkle. “I’m not unaware,” he says quietly.

“No,” Wade presses, holding up his hands. He waves them like he’s stopping traffic and, when that’s not enough, uses his index fingers to draw an invisible line across the space between them. “Listen. I am _crazy_ fucked up. I am fucked up in ways I cannot even describe in words, and as much as you think you know, you really—”

“Wade.” 

His voice is a low rumble, distant thunder on the far side of a mountain, and Wade stops drawing lines in imaginary sand to find his gaze again. For one brief, fleeting second, he can imagine an entire life with Nate Summers: lazy dates bleeding into long mornings in bed, bickering over trivial bullshit, summer trips to destinations unknown, arguments about cases that rattle the windows, and all of it stretching over full, frustrating, happy years together. 

He’s not sure he’s ever imagined that kind of future before. It fades too quickly for him to be sure.

“I know you think you’re fucked up,” Nate tells him quietly, no louder than a whisper. “But so am I. That’s why I can say I’m willing.”

Wade knows, at least in the back of his lizard brain, that his mouth opens. He feels the muscles work, and he recognizes after the fact that it draws his eyebrows up and transforms him into this gaping fish creature. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t really assemble a sentence. He blames his racing heart, and the shaking, uncontrolled breath that rushes out of his lungs.

“You’re—willing,” he repeats, and his fingers sort of helplessly point in Nate’s direction. “I mean, after everything, you— With me, you’d—” He gestures to himself, limp-wristed and half-helpless, then stares at his hands like he’s never seen them before, because _what_? Eventually, he just abandons all hope and drops his hands to the tabletop. “Yeah?”

And whatever tension’s left in Wade’s gut after the beat-skipping heart and the rapidly-emptying lungs rushes away when Nate dips his chin to shake his head—and, like he’s done a thousand other times, to hide a tiny, absolutely genuine smile. “Unless you were planning to offer someone else, then—”

“Oh, shut the hell up,” Wade interrupts, and yeah, it’s official: he might find Nate Summers attractive in thirty million different ways and everything, but he is absolutely in love with that man’s laugh.

 

==

 

 _my sexy lwyer makout partnr s hotter thn ur bf_ , Wade texts Clint a couple hours later.

 _that’s not actually possible_ , Clint immediately shoots back, and Wade cackles.

The rain’s hammering down now, the sort of torrential downpour that suggests you better start gathering up paired animals and crowding them into a giant boat, and Wade’s tucked up on his couch with a thermos full of coffee and his comfiest slippers. He and Nate’d spent most of their late morning talking over half-burnt beans only to wander down the street and snicker over sandwiches before Nate’d needed to leave. “I would be an unsupportive father for missing indoor peewee soccer,” he’d commented once he put his credit card away—and refused Wade’s sixth attempt to hand him cash to cover the price of his lunch. “I’d invite you, but Brett’s her coach this year, and—”

“I know, I know,” Wade’d interrupted, holding up his hands. He’d waved them around a little, just to lighten the mood, and Nate’d actually cracked a smile. “No encouraging the stepdad’s already-problematic assumption that you’re a godless sodomite, especially given how much of that I’ve already done today. I’ll stick to the occasional dance class. Maybe stop by swim team during the summer.”

Nate’d raised an eyebrow. “She’ll coax you into the water,” he’d warned.

“Hey, if the end result is you pulling a Hasselhoff and stripping out of your shirt, I really don’t care _what_ your kid wants me to—”

Nate’d shut him up with a kiss—their first since leaving Starbucks, just in case you’re feeling exceptionally nosy. It started out as a soft brush of lips, too, but then, it’d lingered, stretching and pulling until that first brush transformed into _five_ , and Wade—

Wade’s not proud of this fact, but he’d balled his fingers in Nate’s button-down shirt and practically dragged him over the corner of the table. The only reason they’d really abandoned the whole hungry-teenage-kissing thing was because the waitress’d wandered over and cleared her throat.

Loudly.

“This is the best hallucination ever,” Wade’d decided as they pulled apart, and Nate, to his credit, held off a full three seconds before laughing at him.

But now, hours later, Nate’s discouraged Wade from texting him incessantly throughout the game—something about one of the soccer moms misinterpreting Nate’s chuckle as amusement at her uncoordinated daughter’s expense—and Wade’s cornered into the next best thing. Well, okay, no, that’s unfair. Clint’s in a whole different category than the guy who’d shared his umbrella and gently kissed Wade goodbye in a rain-soaked parking lot. Don’t get him wrong, Clint’s hot and all, but _no_.

The woman-scorned Lifetime special cuts to commercial for what feels like the hundredth time in the last hour as Wade thumbs open a text reply. _im just sayin, mre shouldrs + more chst + slver fox = winr winr chicken dinr_.

He swears he can hear Clint snorting at him. _i don’t know what that means,_ he returns almost immediately, _and Phil’s chest hair trumps all of that._

 _ur distrbing_ , Wade retorts. He even shudders, not that Clint’s there to witness it. It’s the principle of the thing, you know? Like when people boycotted Chik-Fil-A after its owner announced himself to be a homophobic asshole, even though everybody knows that Chik-Fil-A’s waffle fries are the ambrosia of the gods.

At least, you know, that’s what Wade hears and everything. Because bigotry is worse than losing out on a lifetime of the world’s most delicious fried potatoes.

He’s still distracted by the whole French fry thing when his phone chimes again, and he unlocks the screen without really thinking about it. He figures Clint’s sent him another horrifying fact about Coulson’s anatomy. He wonders if there’s still bleach under his sink. Just in case he needs to burn his retinas off or something.

Except the newest text message isn’t really _text_ at all. No, instead, it’s a photograph of a tiny little newborn baby in a too-big pink onesie. Her hair’s as fine as spun gold, sticking up in a hundred different directions, and her lips are pursed and pouty.

He’s still studying the baby’s tiny face—she’s inherited somebody’s long eyelashes, lucky her—when another text rumbles through immediately underneath it.

 **Darcy Lewis:** _uh, do I have the cutest goddaughter EVER or what?_

Wade expects for a moment to feel something like fear welling up in the pit of his stomach and braces himself accordingly, but nothing really happens. His heart beats steadily, his chest rises and falls, his hands don’t shake. No ice-cold terror or paralyzing regret claws its way through his veins. All that blooms inside him is a sort of quiet warmth.

He’s not sure it’s relief, but whatever it is, he kind of likes it.

 _or what!!!_ he texts back. Really, he even hunts down the exclamation mark and everything. _name????_

 _astrid. which at first I thought was sort of weird and lutefisk-y, but it’s growing on me. plus, again, she’s THE CUTEST._

Wade grins and shifts the phone to reply, but before he can even thumb open a reply, another picture rumbles through. In this one, Astrid’s snuggled up against the front of Darcy’s bright yellow Learned Hand Jobs t-shirt, all sleepy and content. Darcy stares down at her, her dark hair curling over one shoulder, and she’s smiling. It’s warm and real, radiating out of the photograph and into the pit of Wade’s stomach until he discovers that he’s smiling, too.

And then, for the first time in what feels like his entire life, he catches himself thinking that maybe everything really will turn out all right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Friday, I will be posting the short final chapter to this tale, the first chapter of the MPU's next long-form story, and a short ficlet involving Astrid Odinson's birth. Because who needs feels from two fronts when you can have them from _three_?
> 
> Also, perpetfic, who I have been friends with forever and who helped inspire the start of this story, wrote a coda to it. Said coda can be found [here.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1026708) And it is awesome.


	16. Plunging Forward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom known as Suffolk County Legal Aid, there was a really awesome prince by the name of Wade Wilson. Because he was a noble and intelligent prince, Wade really thought he knew everything he wanted out of life.
> 
> And then, Wade found out he was super wrong.
> 
> In this chapter, houses are warmed. What? That's what they're called, they're called house-warming parties. But more than houses, Wade's heart is warmed, and he's sort of reminded that sometimes there really is a light at the end of the tunnel. (Also, a broad-chested boyfriend. If you're lucky.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem that Wade references and then bastardizes in this chapter is generally called the “First They Came” poem, the history and text of which can be found [here.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...)
> 
> Thanks to Jen, who has now beta-read almost three entire stories (as she came on board halfway through MP) and saranoh, who has now read two in their entirety. If ever I rule the world, these ladies will be proofreading all my official propaganda. They are just that good.

“Wait,” the Stark-Banner kid whose name Wade always forgets asks, staring at Wade like he’s some kind of five-headed sea monster about to devour a sleepy Oceanside hamlet. “You have a boyfriend now?”

Darcy groans. “Great,” she complains. She sighs in this long-suffering way and throws up her hands. Or, rather, she shifts her arms and shoulders as much as you can when you’re cuddling a tiny, sleepy baby with ridiculous eyelashes. “Now we’re going to have to hear the Ode to the Arms.”

“That was _once_ ,” Wade retorts, elbowing her in the side (and safely away from the small, potentially-squalling thing in her grip). “And I’d been drinking, so I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to jump all the way to—”

“It was seventeen stanzas, and it rhymed!”

“Of course it rhymed! It was a _poem_ , and by definition—”

“Okay, you guys are way too weird for me,” Miles declares, and before either Darcy or Wade can stop him and explain the whole girlfriend-to-boyfriend evolution (and not like a Pokémon, because that’d be super creepy), he picks up his soda and walks away.

Darcy decides to laugh at that for some reason, probably because tormenting teenagers is hilarious but also possibly because the face that Miles pulls is classic Tony Stark disgust. Either way, her laughter’s big, boisterous, and causes the little tiny Odinspawn to startle awake. She stares up at Darcy for a half-second, her huge eyes round with surprise, and then starts shrieking. And trust Wade on this: air raid sirens have _nothing_ on Astrid.

“Shit,” Darcy mutters, and before Wade can suggest that she try turning the baby off and then on again—hey, that’s how he fixes his work laptop when it starts to make horrible sounds, okay?—she makes a beeline for where Jane’s chatting with Maria and Peggy and leaves Wade standing in the middle of the living room, alone.

Not the bad kind of alone! Oh, god, no, not that. It’s actually a nice kind of alone, the one where he can glance around and enjoy the hustle and bustle of Clint and Phil’s housewarming party. The house, which he can’t call Phil’s anymore because Clint now lives there and, apparently, will appear on the mortgage whenever they finish refinancing (and yeah, Wade’d stopped listening to that conversation _real_ quick, thank you very much), is filled with people in a warm, welcoming way. Pretty much the whole of the district attorney’s office is there, segmented off into little groups and chatting about a variety of topics; for example, the Banner-Starks and the Rogers-Barneses (man, that sounds awkward in his head) are very seriously discussing the possibility of taking some creepy dual-family summer trip in one corner while Maria and Peggy are actively backing away from the crying baby in another. The terrifying little blonde girl with the wild eyes alternates between following Miles and Pepper around, hanging on each of them because Pepper’s apparently her new favorite person (something about pretty shoes, Steve’d explained earlier), interrupting some boisterous Odin-story Thor’s relaying to Pepper and Clint. They all slot together somehow, personalities and interests that shouldn’t match up but _do_ , and Wade kind of smiles at that.

And the _kind of_ shifts to a _definitely_ when he glances over at the doorway between the living room and kitchen and discovers that Phil and Natasha are in a pretty intense conversation with the one and only Nate Summers.

Wade hadn’t really planned on inviting anybody to tag along with him, least of all Nate. It’d seemed sort of rude, especially since he’d likely be the only outsider to the D.A.’s office descending upon the newly-minted Barton-Coulson household. He’d even RSVPed for one through the purple-tinged evite page that they’d set up for the occasion, but apparently, that hadn’t been clear enough.

Because a couple days before the party, Clint’d cornered him in the judicial complex law library and asked, “Are you bringing your guy?”

Wade’d stopped glaring at his fruitless WestLaw search—seriously, you’d think _somewhere_ there’d be a case about whether turning off your lights and pretending you aren’t home counted as obstruction—to blink up at the guy. Clint’d clearly just arrived from court, what with the shoulder-hugging blazer and the ass-hugging dress pants, and Wade’d cycled through three really inappropriate comments before deciding all three’d end in Clint smacking him upside the back of his head.

Instead, then, he’d just replied, “Who’s my guy and what am I bringing him to?”

Clint’d pressed his hip against the desk where Wade was working. “Don’t tell me you already forgot about our housewarming,” he’d returned, and Wade’d tried very hard to look innocent. Clint’d just rolled his eyes at that one. “I’m trying to get a final headcount. Are you introducing us to your ‘hunk of burning man-love’ or not?”

Wade’d stepped on his grin. “You remember that text message?”

“That text message is burned into my retinas for eternity. Now: Nate, or no Nate?”

He’d sat there for a minute, the unrepentant seriousness of Clint’s lawyer-face staring down at him, and he’d considered his answer. Because on the one hand, the best laid plans of mice and men had a habit of going astray—at least, according to that book about the farm and the rabbits—but on the other hand . . . 

On the other hand, it’d been almost a month since that first fateful Starbucks date. And, well, the dates hadn’t ended with Starbucks, just in case you worried about that kind of plot development.

He’d wet his lips, then nodded. “Sure,” he’d said, and felt himself grin mostly against his better judgment. “I’ll ask Nate if he wants to come. I mean, might be fun, right?”

Clint’d snorted a laugh. “We can use all the entertainment we can get at this thing,” he’d replied, and Wade’d cackled at the guy as he’d wandered off.

Turns out, Nate’s answer had consisted of a tiny smile and a nod. Granted, Wade probably shouldn’t’ve asked him ten seconds before the guy’d walked into a client meeting, but whatever.

The point was, Nate’d come to the party and didn’t seem to hate it. Better yet, he was voluntarily talking to people _other_ than Wade, and laughing at some dry-humored comment Phil’d pulled out of his back pocket, and—

Yeah, okay.

That felt pretty good.

“My one policy was no hipsters,” Clint complains as Wade’s pondering the warmth that’s curled in his belly, and he glances over just in time to see Darcy roll her eyes and toss her hair. They’re all of five feet away, Clint slipping a coaster under a beer bottle while he and his trial assistant bicker like school children. As god intended, and everything. Wade grins and sneaks in closer to hear the argument. “And no dogs, but Bruce killed that idea before Stark even got it off the ground. But my policy is—”

“That you don’t want to be around people who remind you how stupid you look in skinny jeans?” Darcy interrupts, and Wade watches as Clint stomps down on a surprised little grin. Oh, he definitely wins over the urge, but Wade knows his buddy well enough to know when he’s trying not to crack. Behind them, a scrawny twenty-something in skin-tight jeans and a flannel shirt wanders in from the kitchen, a plastic plate loaded up with cocktail weenies and dip. He’s apparently chatting with Miles about, well, _something_. “You let Wade bring his boyfriend.”

“Wade’s not sure he wants to be in this conversation,” Wade informs her. When she reaches out to jab him in the gut, he catches her hand and turns it back toward her. “Wade’s just drinking beer and watching the drama unfold.”

“Wade’s boyfriend doesn’t dress like he belongs in an Urban Outfitters catalogue,” Clint retorts. Wade lets go of Darcy’s hand, and they both end up gaping at him for a couple seconds. “What? I know what Urban Outfitters is. I’m not _that_ old.”

Darcy rests her hands on her hips and shoots Clint what can only be called “the world’s most dubious look.” Like, life-long skeptics have nothing on Darcy Lewis. “Which one of Coulson’s nieces or nephews has a birthday coming up?”

“Shut up,” Clint grumbles, and Wade’s pretty sure that his neck flushes a little red when Darcy starts to laugh at him.

Wade, on the other hand, sips his beer and then sets it down on the coffee table—with a coaster, but only because he’d rather not suffer the wrath of Phil Coulson’s dirtiest looks. “You know, this kind of reminds me of that famous poem about silence,” he says, and Clint rolls his eyes like his life depends on it. “Come on, you know the one, right? It’s kind of like, ‘When I came for the hipsters, I said nothing. When they came for the shippers, I said nothing.’”

“Shippers?” Clint repeats. He wears his confusion like an, uhm, adult entertainment lounge wears its flashing neon _girls, girls, girls_ sign, as bright and obvious as the noonday sun.

But Darcy’s cracking up laughing, so Wade just keeps right on trucking. “‘When they came for the hate-taggers, I said nothing. And then, when they came for the bronies—’”

“You’re making shit up now,” Clint accuses.

“‘—there was no one left to speak for me.’”

He finishes with a purposeful flourish, including a little bow of his head like the thought of brony hate really did cut him to the very core (when, really, a lot of the bronies qualified as grade-A creepers and he wanted nothing to do with their weird Rarity fetishes, thank you very much), and it’s so overwrought and ridiculous that Darcy erupts into spontaneous applause. It draws the attention of a couple of the nearby groups—including the one with the baby, because she totally stops fussing for a second—and Wade’s momentarily really proud of himself.

Momentarily, though, because then Darcy announces, “You are the greatest former boy-space-friend _ever_ ,” a declaration that is immediately followed up with a very shocked-sounding:

“Wait, you _dated_?”

The very pit of Wade’s stomach freezes over like an arctic lake as he turns, very slowly, to see Peter Parker standing behind him. His pretty brown eyes—hey, Wade’s just making an observation here, okay?—are wide and a little bit shocked, and the cocktail weenie he’s holding sort of hovers in midair. Wade considers snatching it from him, but he thinks maybe it’d be interpreted the wrong way. Especially since Peter keeps glancing between him and Darcy like he’s just been informed that they’re kissing cousins or something.

Darcy sighs. “Yes, Peter, we dated,” she says. She pronounces each word very carefully and in that tone usually employed by preschool teachers. When Peter keeps gaping at her, she steals the cocktail weenie herself. Wade’s always liked Darcy. They’re, like, non-sexual platonic brain partners or something. “It sucked.”

“Big time,” Wade agrees, because he thinks maybe Peter needs the reassurance from both of them. “Like, you know those funny YouTube videos where the inexperienced skateboarder tries to grind on a stair-rail and ends up landing on his—you know?” And in case Peter’s not sure, Wade gestures to his groin. No, not Peter’s groin, his _own_ groin! God, what is wrong with you today? “That’s how it went for us.”

“Pretty much,” Darcy agrees, and helps herself to another one of Peter’s tiny sausages.

Wade assumes that Peter’ll spend the next couple seconds watching his whatever-Darcy-is-to-him (all signs point to the fact they’re dating, but Wade sure as hell isn’t asking) suck barbeque sauce off her fingers, but he doesn’t. No, instead, he stares at Wade, his forehead all creased and his lips pursed into a frown. “But,” he starts to say, but then stops. Wade wonders if maybe he’s one of those people who’re better when they can write things out, since he’s a journalist-type person and everything. 

Darcy sighs and helps herself to a chip this time. “Ask before your brain explodes,” she chides as she loads it up with guacamole.

Peter nods a little but definitely keeps up the unnerving staring. “You have a boyfriend, don’t you?” he finally asks, and man, Wade tries super hard not to burst out laughing at that. “And not just an ordinary boyfriend, either, but a really masculine boyfriend who is definitely not at all female in any way.” He glances over his shoulder to where Nate’s still knee-deep in conversation. “I mean, right?”

“Completely right,” Wade absolutely agrees. He even nods, because, well, Peter’s right. Not that they’re using the label or anything, but Nate’s hands have definitely been down Wade’s pants at this point, a sure sign that their relationship deserves some sort of special terminology.

Darcy, on the other hand, just sighs and shakes her head. “Honey, you have _so_ much to learn about the world,” she informs Peter, and helps herself to another one of his snacks.

The party continues pretty much just as you’d expect it to after that. Wade drifts from group to group, chatting amicably with people who terrify him in court (Maria), or in the hallway (Thor), or in every context because they remind him of the little girl from _The Ring_ (Dot Barnes). He argues about comic books with Miles, Peter, and Phil, competently discusses the merits of different Taser brands with Darcy and Peggy, and even spends two entire minutes holding onto Astrid (only because Jane needed to pee and only because he happened to be the second-nearest human and Tony’d absolutely refused to touch the baby). He feels like he’s a part of this life, one where competent attorneys can shed their professional skins and simply become _people_ with hobbies and quirks all their own.

He’s thinking about this as he listens to Bucky, Natasha, and Bruce talk about some domestic case management thing that’s way over his head when a hand plants itself in the middle of his back. He knows that hand like he knows his own breath—it’s maybe spent a lot of time on his back and side in the last couple weeks—but he twists around to glance at its owner, anyway.

Nate smiles at him, small and private, and turns all his nervy stomach caterpillars into equally-nervy butterflies. “We need to split?” he asks.

“Probably,” Nate admits, but he stays put and joins in Wade’s goodbyes.

They weave through the room like that, Nate shaking hands like the polite bastard he is while Wade mostly sticks with arm-nudges and fist-bumps (especially for that Miles kid, because he’s fucking awesome), until they make it all the way to where Phil and Clint are refilling the snack station in the kitchen. They’re chatting about something completely mundane but still smiling at one another, all happily ensconced in their living-together dream-world, so Wade whistles at them.

Clint knocks the spoon for the buffalo dip off the counter and then swears at them. “Jesus, Wade,” he complains as he bends to pick it up. “Warn a guy.”

Wade considers warning Clint that Phil’s ogling his ass like it’s a slab of beef tenderloin, but he decides against it. “I warned you by whistling at you, since we need to split and didn’t want to just sneak out the back way.”

“Is that the set-up to a dirty joke?” Clint asks as he dumps the spoon in the sink. Wade catches Phil grinning at that, the sneaky asshole. 

“Since we’re leaving because Nate’s got his kid tonight, no dirty jokes. At least, not beyond those rated E-for-everyone.” Clint rolls his eyes at that, complete with a derisive little snorting noise, but Wade knows their friendship well enough to know that Clint secretly appreciates it. Especially since Clint’s spent the last couple weeks complaining that he doesn’t need the intimate details of how amazing Nate’s ass looks in jeans, or whatever.

The guy really needs to learn to appreciate the finer things in life.

Phil, on the other hand, abandons the bag of Doritos to offer Nate a hand, because he’s just as infuriatingly polite and professional as Nate himself. “I’m glad Wade invited you.”

“Even if you’re nothing like any of us expected,” Clint comments from where he’s leaning on the counter, twirling a fresh dip-spoon between his fingers. 

“You’d be surprised how often he hears that,” Wade promises once he’s finished laughing. And the greatest part about him and Nate being, like, something with an _and_ in between their names is that he now knows exactly which of Nate’s little eye-rolls are good-natured. 

The mid-April sunlight filters through the steadily-thickening canopy of spring leaves outside, and Wade stops for a minute on Phil (and Clint’s) driveway to enjoy the smell of newly-blooming flowers and freshly-cut grass. Spring’s always felt a little like a new beginning for him, and he tries to bask in it for a couple seconds before trotting over to Nate’s car. He’s supposed to spend the evening at the Summers household—Hope’s specific request, or at least that’s how Nate translated their Skype conversation from the other night—and he likes the way it feels, transitioning from one place where he sort of belongs to another.

He’s not sure he’ll ever totally belong anywhere—that’s a pretty tall order when you’re Wade Winston Wilson—but he likes that he slots into a couple different lives, these days.

He’s not surprised when Nate catches him by the jacket and starts steering him toward the car, but he definitely lets out a little gasp when the guy crowds him against the side of his sensible sedan and kisses him. It’s the kind of kiss that only develops after a lot of practice with a single individual, one that’s long and soft and slow. It stretches between them until Wade feels like putty in Nate’s hands, his arms wrapped around the guy’s neck and his whole body pressed to him like a second skin. He threads fingers into Nate’s hair, which coaxes a delicious little noise out of him. Apparently Wade’s not the only one who likes fingernails on his scalp.

When they pull apart, they share the same half-cool April air. “I was kind of wondering why you were using Hope as an excuse when you’re not supposed to get her for another couple hours,” Wade murmurs. Their mouths are still so close that the words are almost kisses all their own. 

“I thought of a better way to spend the next few hours,” Nate replies. And as much as Wade wants to employ the killer retort he just thought up, he decides that nipping Nate’s lower lip and then dragging him in for another kiss is a much, _much_ better use of his mouth, thank you.

Because here’s the thing, right? Wade knows that this might not work out. He knows that the cards are stacked against a fucked-up mess of a man like him, and that the world’s great-big wish machine is most definitely broken. Hell, maybe the wish machine isn’t even real, and every person on Earth is really left to muddle through life with no direction whatsoever.

Wade _knows_ all this, but he’s willing to plunge forward anyway.

After all, you only live once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus ends the grand adventures of Wade Winston Wilson and Nathan Still-a-Secret Summers. I want to thank you all for reading this installment of the MPU. This story was a companion and friend through graduation, the bar exam, and swearing-in, and I could not have gotten through any of those things without this tale or without my readers. It's been fantastic fun for me, and I hope you feel the same way.
> 
> If you're still fond of the MPU, please join me for ["Diversions,"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1036030) which starts today. And if you want to know a bit more about Miss Astrid Odinson, you can read a [fluffy story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1036018) with her and her daddy. Don't worry, though; it's not the last you'll see or hear from her.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Four Times Nate Saw Wade's Underwear](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026708) by [Perpetual Motion (perpetfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perpetfic/pseuds/Perpetual%20Motion)
  * [Pride Goeth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044739) by [HugeAlienPie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HugeAlienPie/pseuds/HugeAlienPie)
  * [Scans](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3154019) by [firewordsparkler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firewordsparkler/pseuds/firewordsparkler)




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